The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  It didn’t dawn on me that getting to know my father meant getting to know all of the ways in which we differed philosophically and practically. I hadn’t considered that we would have very different ideas about what one did with a Sunday morning, or how many times we needed to have my Aunt Theresa over for dinner, or what percentage of the available hot water was too much to use in one shower. I hadn’t imagined that he would play the television so loudly that the broadcast studio in Manhattan would wonder where the echo was coming from.

  “Dad, really, I’m trying to get some work done,” I called from behind the closed door of my office.

  He didn’t respond. Of course not. How could he hear me with the television up so loud? I tried to ignore it and return to my article, but the combination of boring quotes from a physician about reducing the risk of testicular cancer and the inane exchanges that were coming through the walls from some second-rate forties movie made that virtually impossible. Finally, I walked out to the den.

  My father looked up at me from his chair with an expression that suggested that he was either baiting me or that he genuinely had no idea what he had done this time to produce the annoyed expression on my face.

  “It’s a little loud,” I said.

  “I turned it down when you complained before,” he said, defensively.

  “And the windows in my office stopped shaking, thanks. Think you can bring it down to subway station level?”

  He scowled and picked up the remote, lowering the volume.

  “I don’t understand why you play this so loud. You don’t have a hearing problem.”

  “It sounds better when it’s loud. Like that music you used to play at home.”

  I looked at the TV screen. “That’s Jane Russell, not Jimi Hendrix. Not to mention the fact that you’re eighty-two and not fourteen.” I was actually a little surprised that he remembered the music thing at all (typical dad/kid moment: “Your father would really prefer it if you didn’t play the music so loud at night”), imagining that it was one of the dozens of ways in which we barely interacted when we had previously been under the same roof.

  He snapped the remote at the television, turning it off. “I didn’t know you were running a library here.”

  I went back to my office and tried to get back into the article, but I was still peeved at our exchange and I couldn’t concentrate. I finally decided that it was time to make myself an early lunch, hoping that it would kick off a much more productive afternoon.

  I went back out to the den. My father was still sitting in his chair, staring at the blank television screen. I assumed he was waiting me out, staying that way until I emerged from my office so he could show me how inconsiderate I was being. I could have asked him what he was doing. I could even have suggested that he put the movie back on, since I wasn’t going to be working for the next half-hour or so. Instead, I just walked into the kitchen, waiting until I got there to ask him if he wanted something to eat. He didn’t answer, but he shuffled into the room a minute later.

  “What I want is a BLT, but you don’t have any more bacon,” he said.

  I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a package.

  “There’s bacon right here.”

  “That’s not real bacon.”

  “It’s turkey bacon. You eat too much pork.”

  “Yeah, and it’s killing me. That stuff doesn’t taste like bacon at all.”

  “That’s because it’s not 80% fat. You know, just because eating terribly hasn’t hurt you yet doesn’t mean it isn’t going to.”

  He walked over to the refrigerator and peered inside. “I’ll go shopping for myself later. What are you having for lunch?”

  “I’m making a veggie burger. Want one?”

  He pulled his head back from the door. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Well, I was going to make a lard on rye, but we’re out of rye.”

  He gave me that look again, the one that said that he was still surprised at the way I was speaking to him. Matty spoke to him like this all the time, and it seemed as though my father enjoyed the challenge of parrying with him. Why was it a problem coming from me? He pulled out a plate of roasted chicken from the previous night’s dinner and walked over to the kitchen table with it.

  As I cooked my burger, I glanced over at him eating the cold chicken. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or upset. I wondered if he was having second thoughts about moving in here, or if he just saw this as part of the process of our learning to live with one another. The thought of the former saddened me. I realized that it would be far worse to go through this and learn that we couldn’t live together than to have never gone through it at all. This was the other thing that was driving me crazy – the emotional see-sawing that came from alternating good moments with my father with bad moments, switching from wanting desperately to have a meaningful bond with him to wishing he’d moved into Darlene’s house instead. It was just like what happened in a romantic relationship when you cared too much. You’d think I might have learned.

  I finished making the burger and sat down at the table next to him. We didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

  “Do you want something to drink?” I said.

  “You could get me a Coke if you want.”

  Things were just destined not to go well. I didn’t buy soda, either. I was feeling pretty displeased with myself at this point. How could I expect him to feel at home if I wouldn’t let him make it his?

  “We don’t have any Coke. We’ll go shopping later this afternoon, okay? We’ll get more bacon, too.”

  He looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t read clearly. I wanted it to say that he’d accepted the flimsy olive branch I was offering. But it might have said that this relationship was getting old quickly. He returned to his meal, and I tried to stomach mine.

  “I used to have quite a thing for Jane Russell,” he said after it had been quiet for a while. “It used to drive your mother crazy. Like my ogling Jane Russell was going to make her stop by the house one day and take me away.”

  I smiled. “Turn it back on when we’re finished with lunch. I’ve been having a hard time with this men’s health article I’m writing. I think I was just using the television as an excuse.”

  “Nah. I have some other stuff I want to do this afternoon. What’s your article about?”

  “Preventing testicular cancer.”

  “Jeez, really?”

  “You should have seen my article on colonoscopies a couple of months ago. I think it even made my computer squeamish.”

  He snickered and got up to get himself a glass of water.

  “You do good stuff. That article about the wheelchair basketball star last year almost made me cry.”

  I didn’t even know that he’d read it. I felt a little catch in my throat, which I tamped down by taking another bite of the burger.

  “What’s that stuff taste like, anyway?” he said, sitting back down.

  “It’s really good. All you need is an imagination. Want a bite?”

  He curled his lip. “My imagination isn’t that good.”

  He put down his fork, which indicated that he was finished eating. At lunch, when he was done, he usually got up and went back into the den. Today, he decided to stay until I was through with my burger. We didn’t talk any more, but he didn’t go back to the den until after I went back to my office.

  I think that qualified as progress.

  Chapter Six

  In the Big Book of Proper Romantic Behavior (a copy of which has never made its way into my hands), there’s probably a chapter about not spending the entirety of your six-month anniversary dinner talking about your father. I certainly hadn’t intended for things to go that way. I’d made reservations at a great fusion place because the idea of anniversaries and fusion seemed kind of sexy. I bought Marina a hand-painted silk scarf she’d admired at a craft gallery a few weeks earlier. I even made sure that the Richard Thompson album she loved was on the iPod fo
r the drive to the restaurant.

  But by the time the wine arrived, I was in full swing. At this point, it had truly settled on me that bringing my father to live in my house was a much bigger deal than I had expected it to be. There were the dozens of ways in which he annoyed me. There were the hundreds of ways in which I felt I was letting him down. There were the tiny breakthrough moments like that one at the kitchen table a couple of days before, when I started to believe that we might actually wind up having a relationship. There were all of those reminders of the relationship we’d never had for the past thirty-two years.

  It might have been easier for me to put all of this aside and to concentrate on Marina if not for what had happened in the afternoon. I’d been working in my office and I came out to get a drink. On my way to the kitchen, I passed my father in the den. He was on his computer trading stocks, something he did practically every afternoon.

  “Want something to drink, Dad?” I said as I passed by.

  “Yeah, make me some of that designer coffee you like so much.”

  I laughed to myself as I walked to the kitchen. This was an example of where things stood in our relationship. We argued about the difference between the fair trade organic coffee beans I bought from a local roaster and the pre-ground stuff he liked out of a can. When I finally got him to taste mine, I could see that he could appreciate the difference, but rather than admit it, he made it seem as though he was conceding to drink it to spare us from having to make two separate pots every day.

  A few minutes later, I brought him a mug. His eyes didn’t leave the computer.

  “Let me take a look at your portfolio,” he said.

  “I don’t need you to take a look at my portfolio.”

  “I promise not to laugh. Do you have it online somewhere?”

  “I really don’t need you to look at my portfolio.”

  He stopped what he was doing and turned to me.

  “I was a successful broker for fifty years. I’ve been trading for sixty. You think you know better than me?”

  I could feel the tingle I felt whenever a confrontation was coming on. I wasn’t particularly anxious to have this one, though.

  “It isn’t about that. There just isn’t that much to talk about.”

  “Then that probably is something we should talk about. You have to be diversified, you know?”

  I took a deep breath. I’d really been dreading this conversation.

  “I have a few thousand in a mutual fund. That’s it.”

  He looked at me as though he couldn’t possibly understand what I was saying.

  “Where’s the rest of your money?”

  “Well, there’s a million or so in a Swiss bank account and I keep another couple of million in the hall closet.”

  He just stared at me. This was a new gambit he’d started using whenever I got sarcastic.

  “I have some money in my checking account to pay bills and all that,” I said. “That’s it.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What the hell are you spending the rest of it on?”

  “I don’t exactly have an extravagant lifestyle, Dad. There isn’t that much ‘rest of it.’”

  He looked back at the screen and typed something on the keyboard. “And I didn’t know what I was talking about when I told you to take that magazine job,” he said under his breath.

  I suppose I should have been thankful that we’d lived together this long before he reminded me of that conversation. It was one of the only times my father had ever “sat me down.” I’d just graduated college with every intention of heading out on my own as a freelancer. A friend hooked me up with an editor at Newsweek, one thing led to another, and the editor wound up offering me a staff position. It wasn’t something I seriously considered, but I mentioned it to my mother just to let her know that things were already looking up for me. That Sunday morning, my father took me aside and told me that he thought I was making a big mistake not opting for the security of a job like that. He argued that I could always go out on my own after I had a few years under my belt. I told him that I disagreed. My position that I needed the freedom to write everything that excited me fell on deaf ears. Only when I suggested in broad terms that I could make more money as a freelancer did he relent. We hadn’t talked about my earnings since that day.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said.

  “If you say so.”

  I wanted to argue that it took time to build a writing career, that I’d received more work in the past year than ever before, that one of my pieces had been submitted by the magazine for a Pulitzer, that I would have hated working for a corporation, and that layoffs were happening all the time on magazine staffs. Instead, I simply went back to my office and had the argument with him in my head.

  “I should have said something to him,” I said to Marina as the waiter poured coffee. This was the third time I’d said that over the course of dinner. “He just gave me that whole superiority thing and made me feel so small-time. How can I feel that way about someone who’s been only a marginal part of my life all these years?”

  Marina smiled at me. Her patience was fathomless.

  “He’s your father. You’d feel that way if you saw him once a decade. That’s just the way that stuff works.”

  “I feel like I’m on a roller coaster with him. We creep slowly up to some peak and then go plummeting straight down. This is not my definition of a great time.”

  “You might have to get used to it.” She smiled softly. “You know, it’s unlikely that you really had no relationship with him over the years. There was almost certainly a lot of stuff going on between you just because you were in the same house. Now you have all of these expectations about what things are going to be like with him living with you. That makes you pretty vulnerable.”

  “Let that be a lesson.”

  I took a sip of coffee and focused on my plight for a moment. I’m relatively sure this wasn’t how Marina envisioned this evening.

  She pointed to the wrapped box I’d placed next to my chair when we sat down. “Is that package for me, or were you going to tip the waiter with it?”

  I couldn’t believe that I’d been so self-absorbed that I hadn’t given her the gift yet. “I’m so stupid,” I said, handing it to her.

  She opened the package and smiled. When she looked up at me, there was a glimmer in her eye that told me I’d chosen wisely.

  “From the Artisan Shop,” she said.

  “I went back there a couple of days later.”

  “I didn’t even realize that you saw me looking at it.”

  “You lingered over it. You don’t linger over much. That seemed to be a sign.”

  She reached across the table and kissed me. Then she handed me my present. It was a handmade pen from the same store.

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t run into each other while we were buying these,” she said with a laugh. I kissed her and thanked her. At that point our desserts arrived.

  “So what was your day like?” I said sheepishly. She looked at me with an expression that acknowledged that I had dominated the evening’s conversation with my issues and that she was okay with it.

  “Kendall Blevins confessed his love for me.”

  “Kendall Blevins?” I imagined a fellow faculty member who had been admiring her in the teachers’ lounge over the years. He would bring her soft drinks and sit uncomfortably close to her. It’s amazing how quickly these images can flash into your head.

  “He’s eight,” she said, showing me once again how ludicrously transparent I was to her.

  “Oh.”

  “It was really very sweet. When I got into my classroom this morning, there was a letter from Kendall sitting on my desk. He told me that he thought about me all the time and that he would do anything for me. That meant to him that he was in love with me. He said he wanted to marry me some day and that he knew there was a difference in our ages but that it didn’t matter to him if it didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t entirely sure h
ow to react to it. You know, I’ve gotten valentines and things like that from kids before, but never a love letter.”

  “Really? A babe like you?” Marina was beautiful, but she also went out of her way to keep her appearance understated while she was in school.

  “I guess when a third-grader falls in love, he wants something more than just a hot chick. Anyway, at lunchtime, I asked him to stay behind. I mentioned the letter, and he turned absolutely scarlet and started fidgeting all over the place. I got him to calm down and then I got him to talk. He told me that he found out this week that his parents were getting a divorce and that his mother was moving out.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. I guess I suddenly became the most solid thing in his life. We talked for a while and he started crying, and I just sort of let him work through it. He seemed pretty upset, so we had lunch together in the classroom. We shared our sandwiches – can you tell me why anybody eats bologna? – which seemed to make him happy. I let him have my granola bar, which he treated like the most exotic thing on the planet.

  “After a while, he was talking about the big flag football game some of the kids were going to have at recess and he seemed okay. Before the rest of the kids got back, I told him that he could talk to me whenever he wanted or whenever he was feeling a little upset about things, but that he was going to have to focus his romantic attentions on third-grade girls. He blushed again. I figured that meant that our fling was over.”

  “Boy, I wish I had you as my third-grade teacher,” I said. This wasn’t the first time she’d stolen my heart with an account of her interaction with her students. And it wasn’t the first time that I wished I could see her in the classroom. I knew simply by knowing Marina that she had to be an inspiring and compassionate teacher. I imagined myself in Kendall’s place and thought about how lucky he was to have her. My own third-grade teacher once closed a book on my face, so I knew the difference.