by Sarah Willis
Sometimes my mother makes us go to bed early. “Go to bed,” she says. “You need your rest.” My father joins in. “Today was longer than most days. Didn’t you feel it? I think there was a whole extra hour there, somewhere. You kids must be exhausted.” He laughs. “Life is just amazing, isn’t it?” Sometimes, like these times, he kisses her right in front of us, longer than a hello or goodbye kiss. Then he kisses us. “Good night,” he says. “Off to bed.”
I knew it was because they wanted to be alone without us around. I didn’t know what they did alone, but now I do. Still, I can’t imagine them like Todd and me. They were probably very sweet lovers, very quiet and gentle. That’s all I’m going to imagine. Some things I don’t need to know.
My father decides to buy a farmhouse, a different one than the one we’re renting. The old farm he finds has lots of land, with a long lane, so the house is way back off the road. He says he got it for a song, and I ask, “What song?” He picks me up and kisses me on my hair. The house needs a lot of work. My father is very happy.
The grass around the house is not grass but head-high hay. Peter, Betsy, and I play hide-and-seek, making a maze of paths through the rough hay. Our world is made of thin, green stripes that crinkle loudly if we move too fast. We don’t.
We hardly notice the work being done. One day we have a toilet, the next, a bathtub with clawed feet like an animal. With deep red paint he draws naked women on the bathroom walls, with breasts as large as whole planets. A few days later he paints over them, covering the walls with the red paint so that going into the bathroom feels like walking onto a dark heart. I imagine the women hidden under the walls, and sometimes I just pee outside. Downstairs, my mother can’t decide on which floral wallpaper she likes best, so he papers each separate wall with a different pattern. He covers the lampshades with the leftover paper. The house is busy, and my mother laughs out loud at every bad joke my father makes. Sometimes she sings “White Coral Bells” as she follows my father around, sidestepping paint cans and sawhorses.
When he’s not working on the house, my father takes us into the woods for a walk. We are surrounded by thin poplars, ancient oaks, and red maples. He finds a large branch lying on the ground and, taking out a knife, carves it, cutting off twigs until it has two arms, a body, and a face. He waltzes with it in the old woods where the ground is clear. My mother dances next to him. My brother thinks this is all pretty stupid, but I am charmed.
The next summer my father builds a stage, a wide platform at the edge of the hiding-hay, near the mountain ash. The banging of his hammer scares off the crows from the treetops, and small animals huddle in their holes.
He holds rehearsals here for the plays that take place outside. The first is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My mother brings out an old patchwork quilt for us to sit on, to watch the kings and fools and fairies. My father plays Theseus, as well as directs, his voice filling the air, his hands waving about his head as he tells everyone what to do, where to move. My mother never takes her eyes off him. She sits cross-legged, leaning back and balancing her weight on her hands. Her waist is slim, her face tan, her shoulder bare. My father winks at her between the scenes. During the scenes he forgets that she’s there. He is Theseus.
I love to watch the rehearsals. I love the way the actors get out of their cars, laughing and gossiping until my father calls them together, the way they become someone else instantly as they step onto the stage. But more, I love when they move the play back to the theatre, where the heavy blue drapes mask out the daylight, where the world smells of sawdust and makeup and hot lights, and I am allowed to sit in the wings behind the heavy curtain and watch the play unfold, the audience entranced and quiet, or erupting with a laugh. My mother gets a baby-sitter and sits in the eighth row center for every performance. My brother Peter comes only for opening night; he thinks plays are barely tolerable. But I think plays are the only important thing in the world, and that my father is the greatest actor alive.
I am eight. Someday I will be a great actress. My father will teach me.
One day in September we get a phone call from Aunt Celia. Grandmother Francine died in her sleep. We have to go to Cleveland, to the funeral. It’s a six-hour drive, and my mother is very quiet. My father keeps his hand on her thigh as he drives. We are dressed in our best clothes because we are going right to the funeral. My father tries to keep us happy by telling us the story of Twelfth Night, quoting all the lines he can remember, and I don’t know how I will ever be able to remember stuff like that. Peter likes the fight scenes, and when my father says, “Put up your sword,” Peter pokes me hard with his finger and I hit him. He hits me back. My father pulls the car over to the side of the road.
“Cut it out,” he says. “This is not the time to fight.” He glances over at our mother, who has her head in her hands. We are both ashamed, and nod. Betsy is perfect and hasn’t moved for hours. We drive on, and I think about how hard I’ll punch Peter back when it is the time to fight.
The funeral’s in a big church, and my grandfather is there. He’s small and wrinkly with enormous eyebrows. I’m confused because my mother said he was dead. There are so many people, aunts and uncles and cousins that I’ve never met, everyone hugging each other. I can’t remember anyone’s names and I know I will never be an actress because I can’t remember well enough. No one hugs my grandfather, and that makes me think he must contagious or something. I just got my shot for measles, but I still don’t want to hug him.
“I thought Grampa was dead,” I tell my father. My mother’s surrounded by too many people to talk to her. No one’s talking to my dad much.
“Well, that’s a long story,” he says, so I get ready for him to tell it, but he doesn’t.
After the funeral we go to Grandmother Francine’s house. I’ve been here two times before that I remember: the time we came and visited the museum with the dinosaurs, and when it was Nana’s birthday, but with my memory, I could be wrong. Maybe I have been here hundreds of times. It smells like lemons and emptiness. My mother shows me her old bedroom, and I sit on the bed. It has a pink spread with fluffy raised lines, and I run my fingers along them. They’re soft, and I want a bedspread like this, but not this one. I’m afraid of Grandmother Francine’s things. My mother sits next to me on the bed. Betsy’s asleep in the car, and Peter is with my dad downstairs talking to an uncle about my grandmother’s car.
“I’m very sad my mother’s dead, Jennifer. It’s okay to be sad. Do you remember when she made you that cake for your fifth birthday? She loved you very much.”
I don’t remember the cake at all, not one little bit, and it was only three years and ten months ago. I feel stupid and start crying. My mother puts her arms around me, and she cries, too. “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay,” she says. We cry until my father and Peter find us. My father touches my mother’s cheek, then picks me up in his arms. It makes me cry harder, and I don’t even know why, because I feel good being held.
“I think everyone’s here,” he says. “I can’t remember anyone’s names. Jesus, there’s a lot of them.”
I am so happy now that my father can’t remember their names, I start to hiccup.
“Let’s go home,” my mother says.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to spend some time with them?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
We walk out, my dad still carrying me, my mother holding Peter’s hand. We drive back to our farm. I forget to beat Peter up.
We see very little of my father. He works late hours and is seldom home. But during the summer that I am ten, he begins to come home in the middle of the day, to take a nap between the rehearsals and the performance. At these times we have to whisper and walk on tiptoes, or stay outside. I spend whole days in the woods—even though we finally have a TV—pretending I am lost in Africa, and starving. I have cookies in my pockets for the times I call intermission.
For
almost a whole year my father takes naps that get longer and longer.
One spring evening I am watching Lassie. My sister sits next to me. My brother’s at a friend’s. I am eleven and too old to be watching Lassie, but my father won’t let us watch much TV, so I watch whatever we are allowed, no matter what it is. In the kitchen my mother cooks soup, cutting vegetables, tossing strange bones into a large pot. She is almost content, but something nags at her. Something is different, but she doesn’t know what, or she doesn’t want to know what. Every time these thoughts creep into her head, a door inside slams, and she cooks.
My father walks down the stairs. We see him at once. His face is contorted. “Who are you?” he yells, so loud. “Who the hell are you?” It’s an entrance in a play, I think. He’s just acting. My mother runs in, stops, and stares at my father. He looks at her. We are so quiet, all of us, that when Lassie barks my sister starts to cry. My father shouts, “Where the hell am I?” He smashes the wall with a fist. “Who are you!” He is terrified. He is not acting.
“Go outside,” she tells me. “Take Betsy. Go to the Brands’. Stay there till I call.”
I hear my father start to cry, and I realize I have never been so scared. I have to tell my legs to move. It’s a half mile to our neighbors. I never think of turning back.
My mother is brave and strong. She explains to us what cancer is. What it might mean. How people will react. She continues to help with our schoolwork, clean, cook, take us shopping. We go to the hospital every day after school. Sometimes, for months, my father comes home, even goes to work. Sometimes he is in the hospital for days or weeks. Neighbors visit with pies and brownies dusted with powdered sugar. Some of them say stupid things. “Be brave.” “Be good to your mother.” This goes on forever.
He looks much older now. He has spots on his skin.
One night, when he puts me to bed reading Huckleberry Finn, he keeps stopping to take a deep breath. Betsy is asleep in the other bed.
“Dad,” I say.
He waves a hand. “Just a second.” Then he tries reading again, but his voice is all scratchy.
“Don’t,” I say, because I don’t want to hear his voice like that. My voice sounds scratchy now, too. He closes the book. My eyes hurt, and I close them.
“I promise I’ll get better,” he says.
I open my eyes and stare at him. “You promised me you’d take me to the amusement park, but you didn’t.” It’s already late August, and he promised to take me for my fifth-grade graduation, which was a long time ago, but then he got sick. Sicker.
“Is that very important to you?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Then we’ll go tomorrow.”
“Just you and me?”
“If that’s what you want.” He brushes the hair out of my face with his hand, and I tense. I love him, but sometimes I am afraid of his body.
Just before lunch my father and I drive off. It’s only a small amusement park, but I love the Tilt-A-Whirl and the flying swings. I can’t believe he is really taking me without Peter and Betsy, and that scares me a little. I wonder what it means.
He tells me on the merry-go-round. He makes us sit together on the goose, which has a seat for old people and doesn’t even go up and down. So far, I have gone on every ride by myself—he says they will make him nauseated. It’s not so fun alone, so I don’t mind sitting with him on the goose, except he ruins it.
“You’re right, Jenny,” he says, putting an arm around my shoulder and leaning down to talk to me, right in my ear, so I can’t possibly not hear him. “Sometimes people can’t keep promises. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to. Do you understand?”
I nod. This was supposed to be a fun day.
“I will do my very best to get better.”
“Eat, then,” I say. I had a hot dog, onion rings, and popcorn, and he wouldn’t eat anything. He’s getting thin and his bones show. If he wants to get better, he has to eat. I know that.
He doesn’t have an answer for this, or any promises. We go around a whole time, just looking at our laps.
“I’m trying,” he says to his legs, like he’s talking to his body.
I don’t look at him. “Make the doctors make you better,” I say, my jaw tight. “Make them.”
“They’re trying their best, Jenny,” he says, and then the ride stops.
“She doesn’t love me as much as you do,” I say, and get off the goose. People are moving around on the merry-go-round, and a girl bumps into me. “Boy oh boy, are you dumb,” I say to her, but she doesn’t hear me.
I walk quickly, but when I turn around, my father is way behind me, walking very slowly. I stop and wait for him. He takes my hand, and we walk back to the car. Only when we are both inside the car does he talk again. “That’s not true,” he says. I lay down across the seat and put my head in his lap, and he turns on the car. He drives home with one hand on my head, and I try really hard not to cry. I am asleep by the time we get home.
That night he eats a lot of dinner. Waving a forkfull of pot roast at me, he chuckles. “Think you have cotton candy in your hair, kid,” he says, and I do. That night he throws up loudly, and my mother cries.
“He’s taking me to Putt-Putt tomorrow,” Peter says. “You better not have gotten him too sick.”
But my father goes back in the hospital before he can play Putt-Putt with Peter. I never find out what he promised Betsy.
He comes back home a week later, for almost three weeks, but he never gets out of bed. Then he goes back to the hospital for a long time.
My mother says we can’t visit him. He doesn’t want us to see him as he is now. There are only weeks left. She sits us down and tells us we must be strong and help each other. This is the talk she has been putting off, but it is her job to do it. Duty is holding her together: a rope tied with knots of must dos, and she knows when the knots are gone, everything completed, she will have no more rope.
I want to see him anyway. I force the issue, and she relents. “He may not recognize you,” she says. I don’t believe her. This is not real, any of it, so I am going to the hospital to say, “Stop it. This is enough. You’re scaring me, so stop it and come home.”
I go in first. She follows like a shadow and sits down in a chair by the door. She’s angry at me, at herself; she knows she shouldn’t have brought me.
He is bald. His black hair is all gone. He is deaf, almost blind. He is very old and shrunken, tucked under the white blanket like a child.
Reaching for my hand, he calls me by my mother’s name, his voice a whisper, not a stage whisper but small and fragile; his voice barely makes it across the few feet separating us. I hold his hand, but I can’t talk, all my protests forgotten. I cannot take my eyes off the brown spots on his bald head. Who is this? This is not my father. I want to leave. I turn to my mother, who nods her head toward the door, but this man will not let go of my hand. She comes over and helps me. She takes his hand, and I walk out quickly. I wait in the hall. I wonder why she stays in there so long.
My mother calls her friend Betsy Tarken in Florida, whom my sister is named after. “He’s going to die,” she says. I hate my mother for saying this. If he dies, it will be her fault. Betsy says she will fly in tomorrow. My mother says, “Oh, no.” Then, “Well, if you insist.” Then, “Thank you. Oh, God, Betsy, I can’t live without him.” She says this while I am right there, in the living room. I’m really scared now. I saw Romeo and Juliet a dozen times. I know how it ends.
He dies while I am in school, two days before Thanksgiving, two days after my twelfth birthday. The day before my birthday, the day Mrs. Tarken arrived, I heard my mother tell her, “God, I hope he doesn’t die on her birthday.” As I blew out my birthday candles, I hoped he wouldn’t die. At least she got her wish.
Mrs. Tarken comes to get me. I see her walking hesitantly toward me while I’m eating lunch in the crowded and loud cafeteria, and right away I know what has happened. The room grows silent, or at least
I think it has. Before my mother’s friend has even reached our table, I turn to the girl next to me. “My dad’s dead. I gotta go. See you tomorrow.” I say this last part without really thinking. I don’t do much thinking for the next few days.
The funeral is at the theatre; this place is all the religion my father had. Fellow actors speak about him, elegantly, in deep, full voices, standing on the edge of the stage, and this is when I know he didn’t really die—wasn’t even sick. It was all an act, a grand and tragic play. This is the last act, when we cry. Then the cast of characters will come out for the curtain call. I wonder vaguely if I’m to go up on the stage. Don’t I have a role in this play?
When he doesn’t appear, even after I give him days and days, I decide he has gone to Canada. I’ve heard about people going there, escaping something, but I can’t figure out what he’s escaping. Maybe he went to act in the Shakespeare Festival that I heard him talk about. He loves Shakespeare.
My father invades my dreams. I see him walking down the street, away from me, his thick black hair bobbing in and out of a crowd. He turns the corner as I run after him. I wake wondering if I will see him today. I am twelve. Reality and fantasy have thin boundaries. As I walk to school, my eyes search in the distance for a black-haired man with a quick stride.
Then I get angry at my father for leaving me. I know deep down inside that he’s dead, but get mad at myself for even thinking that. I believed he wasn’t sick, but my mother wasn’t as good as me at pretending, and in the end she gave up and he died. How will I be a great actress now? I want to yell at him, but he’s not here. My mother is, though, she is right here and so easy to hurt.
In the spring my mother sells the farm because we need the money, and we move to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where my grandmother lived. My mother has an old friend there who gets her a job as a secretary at a public relations firm. We rent one side of a duplex on Oak, a street with lots of kids roller-skating and shouting all the time. I keep thinking that I am at our farm and kids are playing in my yard, and I get mad at them and want them to go away. Then I realize I am in this stupid house, where we can’t turn up the TV because there are people right on the other side of the wall.
