Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  I did not want to go to Perry Tavern, a wood and neon whiskey road-house that reminded me of all the bars my father haunted. There would be a few frizzles of tinsel over the bar, like all the rathouses where every man’s workshirted back was my father’s.

  And now my father had reappeared in the shape of Fergus Buxton, who was regaling Sean and Ed and Gail with stories of the mythical Fergus, aide to Irish King Cuchulain. A sudden panic at how everyone rallied to meet his need twisted inside me, and then a disorienting fear of everything being wrong and nothing, nothing, I could do to fix it came over me like the burlap bag a woodsman in a fairy tale would use to capture an unsuspecting girl. Inside I fought like the girl in that bag, though silently, as I put on my boots and coat and scarf and hat and gloves and went out to my mother’s car. She was driving all of us, crammed together, with Fergus between herself and Sean, who seemed to have adopted the little man who might have been a friend of Yeats himself. Howie and I and Gail and Ed all squashed ourselves in the back seat. Gail and I fought like eight-year-olds. “Move over, Molly! You’re on my coat!”

  “So get off my coat if you want me to move,” I whined.

  “Girls, girls!” Polly growled from the steering wheel. The neon lights of the tavern were up ahead. She slowed the car and parked and everybody crowded in. I was swept along as the whiskies and sodas were poured and knew, as they all found a table and Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas,” that we were in for the long haul. The whole tavern began singing “White Christmas” and Fergus toasted my family. I felt for the niece who somehow had inherited Fergus and wondered whether she was calling the sheriff. But the old codger reigned.

  “Fergus, Fergus, how are you?” rang the tavern and three different rounds of drinks were sent to our table. My eyes filled with water and my chest filled with smoke and my head filled with panic as the ceiling lowered and the bar moved toward me, the girl clutching her glass of ginger ale.

  “Give me the keys, Ma.” I fished in her pocket. “I’m going to wait out in the car. You said one drink.”

  “Oh, Molly, for God’s sake we won’t be long,” Polly said.

  “You’re buying into this, Polly!” I squealed.

  “Don’t make a big deal and it won’t be a big deal,” Ed intoned, crossing his arms sagely. Thank God he’d forgotten his guitar.

  “Join the fun, Mol!” Gail piped up. “It’s a Christmas party!”

  Sean threw back his second club soda. Even Howie had another beer between his two silent paws.

  “You said one drink,” I repeated as I grabbed the keys and leapt out of the tavern into the dark and snow. I got in the car, turned on the ignition, and rolled down the windows with the heat on, not wanting to asphyxiate myself. Sean rushed after me.

  “What happened? What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing?” I parroted back. “I’m waiting in the cold outside a bar for an old man to have a drink, then another and another. I’m waiting outside a bar on Christmas Day like I’ve waited for my father all my life, that’s what I’m doing!”

  “Well you won’t have to wait long, Molly.” Sean said. “Fergus is so old he’ll be drunk with half a shot. Come on back in, Mol, and be with the rest of us.”

  “I can’t, I can’t, I’m gagging and the walls feel like they’re moving to crush me.”

  “Stop being a baby, Mol. Come back in and have a drink with your family.” As Sean turned to go, he snorted in exasperation and asked me the question that Gail and Ted and my friends had asked me so many times, “Why can’t you just have fun?” Why can’t you laugh?

  A sense of humor comes from perspective. Danger is one-dimensional. People in danger don’t laugh. Yet Fergus was not Ted. I knew I was not really endangered now. But the threat lived inside me. It had entered me long ago, like a spirit from the Land of the Shi, the land of Faery. I was as trapped as a girl inside a tree, helpless to free myself. Now Sean and I would fight and all would really be ruined, even the barely constructed life I had just begun.

  “I know you want to talk to Fergus,” I said, “I’ll be fine,” sending him back into the watering hole. After an hour of turning on the ignition and turning it off when I was warmer, I left the car and went to the tavern window. There I was joined by Howie, who’d come outside to get away from the cigarette smoke.

  “Polly’s afraid he’ll pass out,” Howie reported.

  “Polly is just sitting there, encouraging him,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of beer bottles lined up on that table.” Howie was impressed.

  We watched Fergus get up and stumble. Sean and Ed lugged him toward the men’s room.

  “Remember when my father came to get me from Bible School, totally sloshed?”

  “My mother was scared,” Howie said, “scared shitless of your father.”

  “So was I.” Through the window we could see Sean and Ed lugging Fergus back to the table. “Oh, Howie,” I continued suddenly, “your mom gave me the nicest, weirdest blouse that day!”

  Howie tapped on the window to get Polly’s attention. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he said to me emptily.

  “Well, why don’t you go back in and see how much longer they’ll be?”

  Soon Polly was getting the car keys from me, and Ed and Sean were hauling Fergus to the front seat. I crawled in the back again with Gail and Ed and Howie. Gail had apparently been attacking Ed in the tavern. Ed told her she was lucky it was Christmas and he wasn’t going to give her what she deserved. Polly was at the wheel, slowly driving toward Fergus’s niece’s house.

  “We’re all drunk as skunks!” Gail warbled, though Polly was less so. I wouldn’t have dreamed of insisting to my mother that I drive. Insistence would have led to commotion, and besides, I had a ludicrous, unfailing sense of being protected in my mother’s hands.

  —

  “Next year, it’ll be just you and me,” I said at breakfast the next morning. We were the only ones up. Everyone else was too hung over. “We can have a quiet Christmas. No presents. Maybe we’ll even eat out. No cooking.”

  “We don’t have to go that far!” my mother protested, and smiled. We were mother and daughter again. Next year I would leave everyone else far behind. I would not bring sex into her house. I would not bring a Christmas tree or ideas from magazines about what to cook and how to serve it. Gail and Ed and a St. Bernard would not invade her. I would make no demands as I sat quietly by her side so I could have her, so I could drink her up.

  My mother sat reading and smoking at the dining room table while Sean walked through the house to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. Howie was out in the snow with Brandy the St. Bernard. Gail and Ed were just waking up. I shoved the bags in the trunk and our coats in the back seat along with the reproachful rabbit. I wasn’t cut out for this: family, boyfriends, marriage. I couldn’t help thinking of my father, no longer a symbol, but only a man out there. Where was he? In a bar on a beach in a tacky Florida town.

  Whenever we closed up La Grange, we turned the water pails upside down to drip dry. They would see no use till someone came in the spring. By then those pails would be so dry that every mineral deposit would have its ridge. Inside they would be yellow brown, like buckets of desertland. They’d be home to spiders, their webs filled with the exoskeletons of bugs.

  The thought of a life alone entered my head, and it was a calming thought, a soft thought. It had a clean, calico brightness to it. A life alone. I was going to be alone and write and end up an old lady admired by my students and leaving my money to an art colony. What’s so bad about that? But how would I tell my mother? Really, I wouldn’t have to. My fantasy of a life alone was modeled on her. Happiest by herself with a book, a chocolate, and a cigarette, her chores done, her world contained, the phone unanswered, letters unresponded to, alone in a dry pail of silence. When I held to myself the cherished idea of ma vie seul, I was determining to live the best of my mother’s life, childless, manless, friends and relatives at bay. In bed wi
th my books, I’d be cut away from everything, like a picture in a locket. Safe in the borders of a golden heart, I would breathe. I’d never be stuffed up. I’d simply be.

  To be, and not always to react, to exist without organizing people futilely or resisting being erased—that was the present that couldn’t be given. The taking of air into the lungs, then the expelling of it, as any animal does, was the gift so basic it could never be exchanged. Breathing unaware, without gulping or crying or heaving, was being able to live. Wanting this so deeply felt like a huge greed inside me. Greed rhymed with need, didn’t it? And freed.

  “I have a voracious lust for freedom,” I said to Sean as we sped down Route 246, nearly dry now with a morning of traffic and sun.

  “All writers need privacy.” He yawned.

  “Not like I do.”

  I was not having children, I was pruning the family tree. This was it. Now I would live alone, cook alone, drive alone, and do my new job solo. Being paid to be a visiting poet was like a dream to me, and when the Delaware Arts Council invited me to be such a personage after my graduation from Johns Hopkins, I packed immediately. When I realized Sean thought Wilmington was too ugly to live in, my relief popped open like an automatic umbrella—he was moving to Vermont! With a miraculous down payment from Polly, I bought myself a Toyota and found an apartment from which I launched my new work. Days I taught alone, relating only casually with the teachers whose classes I visited, and nights I wrote alone, bathed in the rainwater of calmness, never intruded upon, growing greener, and brighter, and, even one day, happier, deep inside a landscape I had carefully fenced for myself, into which only the privileged were allowed. These privileged were my adult education students, who were so grateful for my attention to their writing that they asked me to continue their classes privately. I entertained them twice a week in my apartment, bookcases studded with the bunches of flowers I bought myself weekly, rewards for my attempts to stop smoking.

  I was going to be addiction free, I’d decided. Slowly I taught myself to write a poem without cigarettes. And slowly I taught myself to write the kind of poem I’d always wanted to write: dense, sensuous, with rhymes. Without friends or a lover, I had endless amounts of time, and used it to learn how to write sonnets. These determined structures and rhyming words many people would find limiting, but to me they were poems with happy barriers. So I happily, sloppily made them, like a child with crayons, loving whatever I made, even though my elephants didn’t look like elephants, my trees only sometimes looked like trees.

  It took me awhile to realize I was lonely for the comfort of another body. When I moaned this discovery to my married students, one of them fixed me up with her single friend. “You won’t like him as a boyfriend,” she stated flatly, “but he’ll be a good companion.” Ben Peters had a house hidden among trees on a winding road. He spent his free time teaching in local prisons. Those bars were a comfort to him, a barrier between him and others. And metal bars were far away from the bar stools his father, like mine, had reeled from. Since Ben required a very wide berth from all who knew him, we got along very well. We liked to have dinner together and discuss our lives, and he invited me to sleep over at his house, not for sex, but for pancakes on Sunday morning. We gave each other so much room that we couldn’t be the best of friends, yet the directness of our agreement carved a kind of relationship that was new for me.

  Ben was the first man I met who had a vasectomy. “I’m fixed,” he said one day when we were discussing his numerous bedmates.

  “What do you mean, you’re fixed?” I sat bolt upright on my living room rug.

  “I’ve had a vasectomy.”

  “Prove it.” I said suspiciously.

  “How the hell can I prove it—you think I carry a certificate or something?”

  I was being ridiculous. “God, I never met an unmarried man who had a vasectomy.”

  “I just don’t want any problems. Any paternity suits.”

  If there were a family of people who consciously acted against having children, Ben was a member, and a brother to me. “I do not want to be a father,” he said vehemently. “I don’t want the responsibility. The money. The little kid. The whining. The custody thing.” (He presumed the relationship to the mother wouldn’t last.) “I can barely give myself what I need.”

  All he had energy for was himself, and this was not the energy of narcissism that made for victims of his charm strewn in his path. All his personal heat was devoted to firing up a wick that could so easily be extinguished. Every day this man wrote a new encouraging note to himself on his bathroom mirror. He trusted no one, and so he became his own son.

  I could not quite build as deep a defense against the world as Ben Peters had done. Something in me kept extending myself to others, even as I withdrew. The phone became a kind of lifeline to me, though it often held a threat in the middle of the night. My father had begun to call me again, and I had allowed it. I thought I might maybe open a little line to my dad. But by this time my father was so brain damaged by alcohol that he could barely keep himself in clean clothes. The incestuous voice rang up in the night, “Hiya Molsie! I’m in Vegas baby Playin’ the slots. Hey, I wake ya up, babe? Got anybody in bed wit’cha? Gettin’ any lately? Hey, didja get my Valentine?”

  Ted had sent me a naked chocolate Kewpie doll with hard candy nipples. I had thrown the box up in the air with horror, taken the doll and the wrappings and thrown them in the garbage, bagged the garbage and gone to a parking lot with a Dumpster and hurled the doll in, unable even to have it in my own trash can.

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said.

  “Hey, how about that! How about that doll, hey, doll, hey Mol the doll!”

  “Well, Dad, I didn’t think it was, I didn’t think it was…” (What was that word Ruta so often used?) “I didn’t think it was too appropriate.” I said her word carefully and coldly. It was 2:47 A.M.

  “Whaddya talking about, Mols? I sencha a Valtine, thas all.”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Dad.”

  “You ain’t no fun, Molly, you never were no fun and you ain’t got no sensa humor.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Hell with you, Molly. Listen, I’m goin’ ta Florida. Back to Treasure Island. I got a little place. Why doncha come down?”

  An invitation from my father! Even in this dangerous conversation I felt a soft paw of hope tap at me.

  “I could help ya with the plane ticket, Mols.”

  “Well, gee, Dad, I’ll think about it,” the reasonable part of me said. “Have you got a number down there?” He gave me half a phone number.

  “Hey, Dad, this is only four numbers.”

  “Yeah, well, four numbers is all I got. I had a stroke, Mol. I dropped my keys. My number’s on my keys. But I dropped my keys. I can’t pick ’em up. I had a stroke, Mol. I dropped ’em an’ I can’t pickem up.”

  “What do you mean you had a stroke?”

  “I had a stroke you asshole!”

  “Were you in the hospital, Dad?”

  “Goddamn right I was in the veterans’ hospital. Now I’m out. In Las Vegas. Playing the slots. Hey, Molsie, I didn’t pack no socks. Send me some socks, OK?”

  “But when are you leaving, Dad? They won’t have time to get there.” Socks? My father wants me to send him socks? My father who sent me a naked chocolate doll? Am I supposed to be his lover or his mother?

  “I’m leavin’ Friday. Friday for Treasure Island.”

  “But it’s Wednesday, Dad. By the time I buy socks tomorrow after work I won’t be able to get them to you. It’s impossible.”

  “It is? Shit. I need socks, Molsie.”

  “Aren’t you in a hotel, Dad?”

  “Sure as shit I’m in a hotel!”

  “Well there’s a store in the hotel lobby, Dad, you know, one of those clothing shops? They’ll have socks. Just go in the store and buy them. You could probably buy them right now, Dad. It’s Las Vegas. That store’s probably open all night.”
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  “OK, OK, you wanna get off the phone. I’ll get the socks, I’ll get the socks. I’m never sendin’ you no more Valentines.”

  “Good, Dad, I don’t want any more Valentines.”

  “That was a nice goddamned kewpie doll, Mols.”

  “It was. It was nice. But not nice for me. I’m your daughter.”

  Could I be your daughter? Could I come and visit you and be your daughter and not your mother or your lover?

  The kind of hope I had was not the good kind of hope in life. It was the kind of hope that is an obstacle. I lay down trembling after jamming the phone in its cradle when Ted hung up. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and made a sign, like Ben Peters’s signs in his bathroom, only mine was for my telephone. It said, “DON’T YOU DARE PICK THIS UP. THIS IS WHY YOU HAVE AN ANSWERING MACHINE.”

  But the telephone was like a string bridge to be thrown over the sudden chasms of my loneliness. On the many nights alone I called Maggie, Lily, all my friends from college, and from graduate school, all over the country I called, running up huge phone bills, even spending hours on the phone with Polly, and sometimes with Gail, who had fled the aging Ed and fallen into the arms of a younger, sexier, harder-living man, Jules.

  “Daddy? You talked to Daddy!” Gail squealed long distance.

  “Well, he called a couple of times.”

  “Florida! He said he’d pay for our tickets! Wow, Mol, the beach, the bodies, the bars—it’s party time, doll.”

  “He said he’d pay for part of our tickets, Gailie, not all of them. We have to come up with the rest.”

  “Well, it’s cool, anyway, I’m getting right out there on Tinker Street and selling my rubbings and candles to those hippie-loving tourists on the road to Woodstock, Molsie. To Florida we go! Beach Blanket Bingo meets Treasure Island! Bring on the pirates!”

  “So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to get us tickets, and then Daddy says he’ll reimburse us. And when he gives us the money, then you’ll take that, OK, and put it with the candle money, and then give it to me for your ticket, all right?”