The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  As for his sleeping on the floor, I’m not saying it’s possible, I’m saying it’s not impossible. I feel compelled to phrase it this way because I’ve heard several friends fondly reminisce about how, when they were children, their fathers told them, “Anything is possible,” a fatherly promise that opened a door to the wondrous world as opposed to the lid of a Pandora’s box from which leaped a headless chicken, or a bride who baked pies so her husband wouldn’t touch her. For me, the words “Anything is possible” haven’t served as a bolstering of hope as much as a warning to run for cover. The one hope I have when I hear that phrase is the hope that whatever happens next won’t demolish the laws of cause and effect.

  “The carpet has a thick underpad,” said my father.

  “What difference does that …?”

  “Some people sleep on wooden boards because they say its good for the spine.”

  “You’re saying you want to sleep on the floor?”

  “I’m not saying want.”

  “Because you’re certainly entitled to sleep in your own bed.”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m glad you think so. I sometimes wonder.”

  A rare admission of fragility. “Dad,” I said, “everyone’s entitled to sleep in their own bed.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” he snapped. “What the hell did you call for, anyway? Did you call to tell me something important, or to spout some meshuggener philosophy about who’s entitled to what?”

  Then I understood my mistake. The first remark—“You’re entitled”—elevated him above others. The second—“Everyone’s entitled”—lumped him with the hoi polloi. If everyone was entitled to what my father was entitled to, then everyone was entitled to sleep in his bed. Which meant that Anna was also entitled. And if—bear with me—Anna slept in my father’s bed, then my father would be forced to sleep on the floor. There hadn’t been a note of ridicule in my voice, not a half note or a demiquaver, but after the sounds issued from my mouth, traveling the distance from my phone to his, they still had to spiral into his ear and reach the receptors of his hearing aid, which transmitted vibrations to his cochlea, which started a synaptic chain-reaction until he grasped my words verbatim. Then turned them into the mocking comment he (wrongly) suspected I’d been thinking all along: Sleep on the floor for all I care. That’s where you belong!

  “Hello?” said my father.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “That’s funny,” he grumbled, “’cause I haven’t been talking.”

  How did he finally tell me they’d divorced? He never did. Anna, he said, was visiting her daughter. Substitute teaching. Showing a house. Indisposed. It was up to me to add up the long column of her absences until I realized she was gone for good. Then never mention the woman again. Having read about their divorce in the newspaper allowed me to play along without getting lost in a maze of ambiguity. The facts were “written in print,” as my father would have said, and as long as I didn’t depend on him for facts, I could nod at his improvisations, responding with a calm “I see.” Instead of resisting his attempts to steer the conversation away from Anna, I’d swerve to an entirely different subject with such disarming agility and speed, my non sequiturs rivaled the master’s. My refusal to probe at first relieved, then pleased my father, as if by swallowing falsehoods whole, I’d at last done something to make him proud. The greater his appreciation, the more I excelled at complicity. He wasn’t deceiving me, I began to believe, so much as obliquely hinting at the truth.

  He never pursued litigation against Anna. His petition for divorce ended up among thousands of accounts of marital discord housed in the County Hall of Records—an enormous vault of a building not far from his old Spring Street office—never to be read again.

  She left behind several possessions. Blueprints for a Mar Vista subdivision were stored in a drawer. The spines of paperback thrillers announced their titillating, sideways titles from a shelf in the upstairs hall. A few of her dresses still hung in a closet, running the gamut from gray to navy blue.

  These abandoned belongings remained exactly where she left them, and one could reasonably argue that, by failing to either return or discard them, my father was the one who’d left them behind. When I first came to visit him after their divorce, the sight of Anna’s things reminded me how capricious and fleeting people’s allegiances can be. Eventually, however, her possessions became a common sight, blending into the rest of the house. By keeping her belongings out in the open and subjecting them to his diligent neglect, my father was making them disappear without so much as having to touch them.

  One possession of Anna’s convinced me that there had been a mitigating circumstance in the demise of their marriage. The medicine cabinet in the master bathroom contained a bottle of Tofranil with Anna’s maiden name printed on the label. I’d discovered it one day when my father asked me to bring him one of his blood pressure pills. The word Tofranil sounded familiar; I’d overhead Brian talking with his colleagues often enough to associate the suffix nil with the power of drugs (or at least with the promise of drug companies) to nullify depression. Brian would later confirm that Tofranil was among a class of antidepressants known as tricyclics. In fact, he was able to close his eyes and recite the drug’s side effects from memory, the way he could a Joyce Kilmer poem he’d learned in grade school—I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree—though this recitation, with its grim rhythm and incessant symptomology, was closer in spirit to Sylvia Plath: dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, decreased libido, tremors, fatigue, neuropathy, hallucinations, nightmares.

  As I held the bottle of Tofranil, the memory of dinner with my father and Anna underwent a swift revision. She still sat across from me in a red leather booth, but her weariness, a weariness I’d attributed to middle age, deepened into a resignation that age alone couldn’t explain. Her eyes were slower in meeting mine. Her handshake was leaden in retrospect. How could I not have noticed the gravity and drag of depression?

  From there, I extrapolated days and nights of Anna’s inertia, and my father pulling out all the stops to lighten her mood. If I’ve portrayed Edward Cooper as a humorless man, allow me to correct that impression. He knew his mischief forward and back. The tension that usually churned in his stomach, knotting muscles and causing heartburn, was sometimes funneled into kibitzing, which, as any kibitzer knows, is an art much harder to master than it looks. You have to walk a line between antics and madness. You have to let your hair down, if you have any left. You have to march in a one-man band, harmonica firmly clenched between your teeth. While flooring the Cadillac on the freeway, captain of all that humming tonnage, my father was likely to burst into song. “Clang, clang, clang, went the trolley,” he sang, and “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.” He bellowed every note for effect, conducting an invisible orchestra with hands that should have been gripping the wheel. And when the Chevron attendant filled the tank, Dad would clutch his stomach and groan, “I’m getting gas!”

  The problem was, he expected you to play the role of tireless sidekick. You had to humor him for humoring you. It was tit for tat. Itch my back and I’ll itch yours. At first he’d succeed in cracking you up, but gales of laughter are hard to sustain. Your cheeks begin to ache. Your guffaws grow hollow. My father watched closely and measured your reaction, and anything less than a robust chuckle raised a red flag. “What’s the matter?” he’d ask midjoke, the punch line hanging in the air like a boulder.

  It was one thing for me to egg him on; this jaunty father intent on my reaction was a wish fulfilled. But Anna may have seen herself as hopelessly stony compared to her husband, neither pleased nor piqued by his nonstop vaudeville. I can see her smiling wanly at his gags, sorry to be such a “stick in the mud,” as my father tended to call nonlaughers. (Unless it was he who wasn’t laughing, in which case the joker was “a pain in the ass.”) The further Anna sank into the doldrums, the more zealously my father would prod, trotting out puns and k
nock-knock jokes, refusing to lose his wife to despair, to botch a second chance at marriage, no better than the lovelorn schmucks he’d fought for in court. It was Anna who swallowed the Tofranil, but the drug etched pathways in both their brains, altering their futures one neuron at a time.

  I liked to visit my father during this fictitious phase of his marriage. Once a week, after my three o’clock class, I’d maneuver my sputtering Fiat up the driveway, and before I came to a full stop, he’d appear at the front door, his jumpsuited figure sunstruck against the dark interior of the house. Even if his hearing aid had been turned up all the way, the sound of the engine couldn’t have alerted him to my arrival, so it wasn’t completely far-fetched of me to believe that he may have been waiting at the living room window, the brick-and-mortar curtain parted, his breath clouding a pane of glass as he scanned the length of Ambrose Avenue searching for my car. As soon as I walked through the door, he’d open a can of salted peanuts and we’d sink into the living room couch just in time to watch Wheel of Fortune. I think I speak for both of us when I say that we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could yell out answers to the word puzzles without our usual displays of competitiveness and poor sportsmanship.

  When it came to words, my father believed I possessed an unfair advantage. I’d intuited the rules of grammar at a young age. Idioms and figures of speech stuck in my head as stubbornly as TV jingles. Yet I wasn’t able to explain to my father (or to myself) that language helped me navigate a world of half-truths and lawyerly rationalizations.

  For all his impassioned eloquence in court, my father still made verbal slips, such as, You want I should check the time? or, The guy don’t know what he’s talking about. And when he did, his eyes widened at the realization, and he’d bluster with fancy, ready-made phrases: Be that as it may … In light of the fact … Contrary to popular opinion … By the same token. Still, vestiges of the scrambled syntax he’d inherited from his Russian immigrant parents, along with the “dem” and “doze” of an adolescence spent on the streets of Philadelphia, seeped into his patterns of speech. It wasn’t uncommon for high and low diction to collide midsentence: Be that as it may, the guy don’t know what he’s talking about.

  To this day I know almost nothing about my grandparents (had he spent his fund of stories on my brothers?) except for this: Abe and Ruth Cooper—an Anglicized surname given to my grandfather, a barrel maker, at Ellis Island—parted company with friends by calling out in unison, “See you yesterday,” instead of, “See you tomorrow.” My father laughed when recounting the story, but it caused him to blush with an ancient shame. What embarrassed him, it’s taken me decades to realize, wasn’t just his parents’ grammar, but their “yesterday” in the larger sense: the backwardness of greenhorns slow to adapt.

  His parents spoke broken English. My parents spoke broken Yiddish, but only in the presence of other Jews or when they wanted to talk in code around their children. They shifted into Yiddish with the relief of people removing a pair of tight shoes, their conversation suddenly peppered with exclamations such as Pish! and Feh! Liberated by Yiddish, my father shrugged theatrically, batted at the air, and cast imploring glances toward God. Should he stare into the distance, his sighs prolonged, I’d wonder if he was telling stories about his childhood in Atlantic City or his adolescence in Philadelphia. Perhaps such stories were diluted by English, vibrant only when told in the language of his past.

  My longing to return with him to the scenes and people of his youth (if the past, in fact, was what he’d been discussing) amounted to a shared nostalgia, each of us, in his different way, succumbing to the gravitational tug of a lost world. When I could no longer contain myself and ventured a question, he seemed pleased, but instead of answering, he’d turn toward whomever he’d been addressing and make, in Yiddish, what I supposed was a comment about my curiosity. It was disconcerting to see him inspired to such expressiveness by a language meant to exclude me, his mother tongue providing a kind of exuberant background music as I went about my chores.

  Nothing infuriated my father as much as having his grammar corrected, especially by a precocious kid. In the rare instance I dared to correct him—“The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”—he’d glare at me, his body rigid, the tell-tale vein protruding at his temple. He wanted to defend himself, but once he’d been admonished, he couldn’t fire back. I hadn’t simply pointed out a grammatical error, I’d declared myself American—more American than he—and lumped him in the league of greenhorns. His only recourse was to leave the room before he proved me right with a flustered rebuttal or a wordless blow.

  Perhaps it’s poetic justice that I eventually came to share my father’s dread of self-betrayal, came to know firsthand his fear that he risked ridicule and ostracism merely by opening his mouth to speak. Throughout my adolescence I worried that if I didn’t watch every word I said, my sibilant s’s and flamboyant gestures were sure to articulate, all too clearly, who and what I was.

  After Anna left him, however, my father and I found ourselves able to communicate with unusual ease. He finally seemed convinced that teaching three classes a week constituted a legitimate workload. I learned to defer to his opinions and to tread lightly around conversational powder kegs. “God bless you!” he’d blurt whenever I used a word that sounded to him like a bunch of noisy syllables. Chanteuse. “God bless you!” Phlegmatic. “God bless you!”

  In order to keep up the appearance of normalcy—that is, in order to perpetuate the myth of his marriage—I kept thinking I should inquire about Anna, but every time I thought of asking where she was, I heard his answer echo in my head: What do I look like, the FBI? She’ll be back when she’s back, and until she is, she’s somewhere else. That he’d edited a wife out of existence didn’t strike me as a portent for the future of our own relationship. Or perhaps I chose to ignore it. In those days we’d come as close to courtship as a father and son can come.

  While watching contestants spin the wheel of fortune, its prizes and penalties blurring together, we passed the can of peanuts back and forth. Light dimmed beyond the picture window. We were too mesmerized by Vanna White turning blanks into letters to wrench ourselves from the sofa and switch on a nearby lamp. As darkness enlarged the living room, our guesses at the unsolved puzzles—“The something you something may be your something!” “Never something today what you can something tomorrow!”—rang truer than any adages I knew.

  My father sprawled on the king-size mattress, his crutches propped against the bedroom wall as if they were holding it up. Woozy from anti-inflammatories and winded from our trip up the stairs, his eyes slowly closed. I stood at the foot of the bed and watched him sleep, just as he may have long ago stood at the foot of my bed and watched me. His eyes darted beneath the lids, mouth twitching with sentiments that were anybody’s guess. In the throes of a dream, he flung out his arm and it came to rest on the empty side of the mattress. My mother’s side. Anna’s side. Now Betty’s, I supposed. On the nightstand lay her white leather Bible, a crimson ribbon saving her place.

  Distant voices from This Is Your Day drifted upstairs. Benny Hinn and his congregation were speaking in tongues. Vowels reverberated. Consonants clicked. I made a mental note to use the word glossolalia when explaining onomatopoeia to my class. A kind of murmuring religious fervor charged the air, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Betty lay beside my father at night and read Bible passages aloud, promising an afterlife in return for placing his faith in Jesus. Given his gout, she had a captive audience, and if they were in fact sleeping together, I wouldn’t be surprised if my father listened to excerpts from the New Testament in the hope that his attentiveness might lead to sex, though how he’d manage to have sex while his toe was swollen was something I no more wanted to think about than he’d want to think about me having sex with my mental-doctor friend. Having sex with Brian, however, was something I not only wanted to think about, but found myself thinking about whether I wanted to or not. My father and I we
re allied in our attitude toward physical gratification; we considered ourselves lucky that we were driven to distraction by sex instead of by some monotonous hobby like stamp collecting. The only difference was that I wanted to have sex with a doctor and he with a nurse. This may explain why he’d greeted the news of my relationship with Brian with equanimity, and why I had written about his extramarital affairs with what I hoped was a similar equanimity, though it was hard for me to appreciate our mutual equanimity while knowing he’d explode if he ever found out that the essay had been published in a literary review, and was about to appear in my first book, a collection of essays from a university press.

  Now I had to keep the news of my publication secret from the one person I most wanted to impress with the fact that all those years I’d spent hunched over my desk, typing with two index fingers, had, at the age of thirty-eight, finally led to the publication of a book. Of course, I’d brought this problem upon myself by writing about him, but Dad never expressed interest in my work, and I couldn’t ignore a subject that took hold of my imagination with such insistence.

  It’s not that writing had been my way to understand him; his life was larger and more surprising than my capacity to understand it. Understanding my father was as unsustainable a state of mind as euphoria or patience. Maybe I understood him for a few minutes at a time, and maybe, for a few minutes at a time, I understood him better than anyone else understood him, but if I said my understanding was definitive, I’d be saying that the man was static, a done deal, a wrapped package, never slipping out of character or spilling over with contradictions, never driven by affinities and fears that even he himself couldn’t fathom. By delving into the riddle of him, I hoped to know his mystery by finer degrees. Through language could I inhabit him as much as he had inhabited me. Through language I could dream that dream called Father.