“I don’t really wear hats,” Amy told him.
I didn’t want my father to feel bad, so I picked it up. “The only bit that really says ‘woman’ is the bow,” I said, walking into the bathroom to try it on and noticing that both the sinks were filled with stuffed animals. It was like they had planned to take a bath and were just waiting for someone to turn the water on. What on earth? I thought. “I can’t believe that the straw’s still in such good shape,” I called into the other room.
“Isn’t it?” my father called back.
“I’ve got a little something for you too,” he said as I reclaimed my seat, the hat still on my head. “Just a few things I knew you’d like.”
On top of my pile were two Brueghel postcards. Both were in inexpensive plastic frames, bought that way, I assumed.
“He’s someone you like, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Beneath the postcards were a couple of nature calendars, the first of which had a fox on the cover, nuzzling her kit.
“Isn’t that terrific! I thought maybe you’d want to frame it.”
“Hmmmm,” I said. My father has criticized every gift I’ve ever given him. His disapproval is consistently swift and hard, but for some reason I can never respond in kind. “How nice,” I told him.
The second calendar was devoted to chimps. “I know how much you like them. And these photos, I’m telling you, they’re just outstanding.”
I opened it to March and saw an adult male with his arms crossed, not defiantly but as if he were trying to make up his mind about something: whether to rip off the photographer’s hands or to start with his face, most likely. Then I noticed that the calendar was two years old. “Well,” I announced, looking at my watch, “I guess we’d better get going.”
Amy and I were too shaken up to say much of anything in the car—underpants on Mom’s butcher-block table!—so we just looked out the windows until we reached the airport. There we learned there was “weather” in Washington, DC, where Hugh and I were headed.
“Well, where isn’t there weather?” I whined, looking up at the board. “Can’t they be more specific?”
Amy’s flight to New York had been affected by distant storms as well. It was one of those times when your flights are delayed, and then delayed again. The DC departure time moved from seven to eight, then eventually to nine forty-five. Amy’s flight was canceled altogether, so she wound up catching a taxi and spending the night in a hotel. After sitting around for a while, Hugh and I decided we might as well eat dinner. There weren’t many choices at that hour, so we went to the 42nd St. Oyster Bar.
“This is where my mom and dad were the night Martin Luther King was assassinated,” I said to Hugh after we had ordered. “Not here at the airport, obviously, but at their original location downtown.” I told him how someone had stepped out of the kitchen to announce the news, and how everyone but my parents had applauded. “Our family hadn’t been in the South very long, and that was a real eye-opener.”
“Hmmm,” Hugh said, pulling out his phone. “I’m just going to text Amy and see if she was able to book a flight for tomorrow morning.”
I looked around at our fellow diners, all on their way to somewhere else, but all I could think about was my father, crawling through his house in search of a chair he could use to hoist himself up. He’d said it so matter-of-factly, “What I do…,” as if I’d asked how he makes a sandwich.
There are any number of people who have to live like that when they get to be terribly old, but for him it’s a choice. My father could have a nice place. There could be help at the ready should he fall: a cook, a driver, someone to make the bed every morning. He’s just too cheap to pay for it. “The killer,” I said to Hugh, who had finished texting Amy and was now texting someone else, “is that he’s saving the money to give to his kids, who will spend it wildly without even thinking. Maybe not Lisa, but you’ve seen everyone else in action. A person could live handsomely on the money we waste over the course of a given year, and here’s our father wandering from room to room with a flashlight. He falls and gets banged up, then covers his bruises with cotton balls and masking tape because Band-Aids are too expensive!”
“Why don’t you pay to get him a driver?” Hugh asked.
“Because he can afford it on his own,” I told him.
Of course, Hugh was right—I should at least offer to pay. Like anyone else, my father loves free stuff. I was hesitating, in part, because he’d cut me out of his will.
“You told me you wanted to be cut out,” he’d said five years earlier when I confronted him about it.
“When?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you did.”
There was no way on earth that this was true. In that respect my father is very much like the current president: There were a million and a half people at my inauguration. The biggest crowd ever—a million and a half!
It’s hard to even call it lying; rather, it’s a form of insistence. This is the way I need it to be, goddamn it.
He then told me I could pick something out of the house and he’d set it aside for me to inherit. I looked around at the furniture, all of it covered with papers, and at the gloomy artwork he and my mother had bought in the seventies. “There’s a guide for mixing drinks you have downstairs behind the bar,” I said. “A bawdy paperback from 1960 illustrated by a cartoonist named Vip. I wouldn’t mind having that, I suppose.”
“But you don’t even drink,” he said.
I sighed. “You know what? You’re right. It’s better you give it to Amy, or Paul. One of them might want a Pink Squirrel some night.”
Our food was delivered, and I said to Hugh, “I don’t remember ever fighting with my mom, but with me and my dad it was constant. Once, in high school, he was shouting at me for something or other—running too much bathwater, maybe—and I shouted back, ‘You are going to die alone!’ Isn’t that awful?” I pushed some shrimp and grits around my plate. “Now here he is, trying to do just that—die alone—and everyone’s giving him a hard time about it.”
When our check came, I paid. Hugh went to our gate, but there was still an hour to kill before boarding, so I took a walk from one end of the terminal to the other, then back again, passing the now shuttered Brooks Brothers, the Starbucks, the bookstore. This terminal didn’t exist when I lived in Chicago or New York. The Raleigh airport was smaller and slower back then. I’d fly home for a visit and wait at the baggage claim for half an hour before calling the house.
My father would answer—a bad sign, as it was he who was supposed to pick me up. “Did you forget I was flying in?” I’d ask. “I told you my plane was landing at six.”
“Well, it’s not six yet.”
“Dad, it’s six thirty.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m looking at the clock in the airport and at my watch, and both say six thirty.”
“Well, it’s sure as hell not six thirty here, but I’m on my way. I’m leaving the house right now.”
Twenty minutes later I’d phone again, and again he would pick up. I could hear his TV in the background. “I told you I’m on my way. Jesus!”
I’d wish then that I could afford to go to the ticket counter and buy a seat on the next plane back to where I’d come from. My father would arrive to pick me up, and I’d be gone, a speck in the sky.
“The secret to Dad’s longevity isn’t diet or exercise, or even his genes,” I’ve often said to Paul and my sisters. “He’s just late for death, the way he’s been late for everything else all his life.”
There are things I avoid talking about with my father now—politics, for instance. He’s always operated on the assumption that I don’t know anything, can’t know anything, really. The issues are as far beyond my grasp as they are for the chimps in the calendar he gave me. Sure, one might pull a lever in a voting booth, but there could be no actual thought behind it.
The fight we had following Trump�
��s election had been particularly ugly, and we could easily have it again every hour of every day. I don’t want to, though, don’t want what could be the last words we say to each other to be ugly. It’s why I didn’t bring up Jim Comey during our visit. Easier to put on a straw hat that once belonged to my mother and to accept with grace the framed postcards and nature calendars I dropped into an airport trash can before boarding my flight to Washington. It wasn’t where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where they ended up.
About the Author
David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and, most recently, Theft by Finding. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. He lives in England.
davidsedarisbooks.com
facebook.com/davidsedaris
Books by David Sedaris
Theft by Finding
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Holidays on Ice
Naked
Barrel Fever
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Company Man
Now We Are Five
Little Guy
Stepping Out
A House Divided
The Perfect Fit
Leviathan
Your English Is So Good
Calypso
A Modest Proposal
The Silent Treatment
Untamed
The One(s) Who Got Away
Sorry
Boo-Hooey
A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately
Why Aren’t You Laughing?
I’m Still Standing
The Spirit World
And While You’re Up There, Check On My Prostate
The Comey Memo
About the Author
Books by David Sedaris
Discover More by David Sedaris
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
Calypso Page 19
