The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Are you lost?” my mother said again. She actually took a step toward him. “Are you looking for another house?”

  The boy swallowed. His Adam’s apple slid up and down his gullet. He held his mouth open, and his thin lips quivered. His long blond hair was in tangles. I saw he had an ugly gash in the meat of his left hand, and just as I noticed it he tried to stanch the blood by wrapping his palm in the hem of his coat.

  “Are you hurt?” my mother said. “Let me see.”

  She reached out her hand to him, and the boy looked at it—veined and wrinkled and chafed raw from the detergents in the laundry at the nursing home. The boy lifted his eyes and looked at my mother with what I believed was yearning, the same desire for her refuge and protection that I had often felt, the same desire to finally be unburdened. I didn’t know this boy or what his trouble was, but I knew what it was to want to be free from this life that pressed down on me, this bastard life, a life that was spurious and counterfeit, a poor imitation of the happier one that might have been mine if my father hadn’t made a mistake that day in the cornfield, if he hadn’t lost his hands and become an angry man.

  The boy let his hand come free from the hem of his coat. He studied the cut. Then he looked at my mother again, and in my silence I urged him to go to her, to let her take care of him. I wanted to watch her clean his wound, put ointment on it, bandage it. I wanted her to speak to him in her soft tones, to tell him, It’s fine, it’s fine, everything will be just fine.

  The rest of my life was out there waiting for me. I wanted it to be a life of goodness. And I think I wanted to be able to look back at that moment someday and say it made all the difference.

  But I can’t say that, because just as the boy was about to reach out his cut hand to my mother, my father banged his hooks together.

  “Who the hell do you think you are,” he said, “to come into my house?”

  That’s when the boy got spooked. He turned and ran, his boots loud on our floor. He ran out into the cold night, and I felt my heart go with him. I felt something leave our house, some measure of hope. If there had been more room for my mother’s kindness that night, there might have been a healing, one that might have saved me.

  “You better run,” my father said.

  I would need years and years to escape the anger of that house, and even now, when I live a more gentle life, I still feel I’m fighting the rage my father left inside me, always trying to tamp it down, always on guard against its return.

  I’d lock it up if I could, forget the combination, let the tumblers go to rust, so no one could ever turn them.

  “That poor boy,” my mother said that night.

  I’ll always wonder what drew him to our house. Was there a mercy there that my father and I were too blind to see? Was it ours for the claiming, if only we would? Maybe we were too busy feeling hurt to see that we could forgive ourselves; in spite of my mother’s influence, we couldn’t accept that we, the damaged and the maimed, had a right to a kinder way of living.

  My father closed the door that night. He fit the curve of his hook to the underside of the knob and pulled until the door was latched. He opened his hook and concentrated on grasping the tab of the lock inside the knob. He didn’t ask for help, and neither my mother nor I offered any. He took awhile, but he kept working at it until, finally, the door was locked.

  “That kid was wild,” my father said. “He was out of his head.” He banged his hooks together again. “To come into our house? What kind of person would do that? What’s happened to people? What kind of life does that kid have?”

  “He was in trouble,” my mother said.

  Something in her voice shook me—a note of weariness, a resignation. It was as if she were giving up on my father and me, and maybe she did for that brief moment. Maybe she thought, God, help them.

  I could tell my father heard the same thing I did: my mother, the eternal believer. His face crumpled with confusion. Had he heard what he thought he did? This was the woman he’d married when he was nearly forty, the woman who’d loved him before the accident and beyond, the woman he’d counted on for so much.

  When he finally spoke, his voice quavered. “I know he was,” he said. That was as close as he could come to telling my mother he was sorry for all the anger he’d brought into our home. I was ashamed of my own part in that anger. I was ashamed of the two of us.

  Although I stayed in the kitchen, some part of me went with my father as he moved on into the living room. I heard his hook scraping at the knob of the front door as he locked it, closing us in, sealing us up.

  “You don’t have to worry now,” he said. In his bluster, I heard what I’d never been able to distinguish in the noise of all our fighting. He was proud. He was watching out for us. This was his secret. His world was always tilting. He was on guard. Let the bastards come. He’d be ready. Wounded, as he was, he knew no other way to speak of love.

  LISA NIKOLIDAKIS

  Family Tradition

  FROM Southern Indiana Review

  On my twenty-seventh birthday, in a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey, my father murdered his live-in girlfriend, her fifteen-year-old daughter, then shot himself. I never sensed the shots. I should have felt them in my gut, having been born of the same blood, the same inheritance, the same home. It should have been like that feeling one twin gets when the other is in trouble, a hand burned on the stove matched with the other’s intuitive pain. But the six pints of Guinness I’d slaughtered in celebration of my birthday kept everything muffled. Instead I felt only the fog of drunkenness, that genetic trait of its own, and spent the end of the night passed out in a chair, cocooned in a deep, black silence.

  Twenty years earlier, my mother somehow sensed her father’s shot and left her shift at Olga’s diner early, certain, never once doubting herself that it had happened. When she came home, my father and I were sitting at the kitchen table, the food before us long grown cold, the news of my grandfather’s suicide having quieted any chatter, my younger brother having fortunately spent that night at a friend’s house. My mother took one look at us and threw her apron down, the smell of it thick with fryer grease, and cried, her shoulders shaking as she gasped for breath. With an arm’s embrace, my father consoled her while she buried her face and wept into a tuft of chest hair that escaped his shirt. When she raised her head, my father pressed his forehead to hers in a rare moment so tender, I knew I was supposed to cry. My first experience with grief. Instead I sat motionless, a robotic reflexiveness, a brief denial of my mother’s pain as I watched the outpouring; it wasn’t until my father told me to go to my room that I felt anything, my fists curled into tiny balls. And later, months later, when my mother still cried and, worse, stared vacantly, absently, into nothingness, I began bargaining and making promises to God to make it all stop.

  My grandfather’s suicide wasn’t shocking in the traditional sense. His letters mailed to my mother in New Jersey from the Arizona desert had become increasingly desperate-sounding. He’d been a flyboy in World War II’s Air Corps, a fact that made him seem infinitely handsome to me, the pictures of him in uniform epitomizing for my young mind what a man is supposed to look like: broad-jawed, trim, dedicated to his country. I suspect he’d written letters to his first wife, a woman he’d married just months before he left for England, sheltering her from the horrors of war, reassuring her that they would unite again soon, would start their real life. But when the war neared its end and he returned home fifty missions later, he found her pregnant. Within a year he was officially divorced and remarried to my grandmother, who, from what my own mother tells me, looked eerily like his first wife. A ghost of a replacement. Perhaps if the first wife hadn’t wronged him, hadn’t cuckolded him in front of the neighbors and waged a separate war of infidelity on him, he would’ve been a good husband and father. Instead he was changed, bitter, violent, and would remain that way for the rest of his life. Years later my grandfather contracted emphysema, a disease that he first tr
ied to pacify by smoking more, and his letters, always handwritten in a scrawling, thoughtful script, revealed his increasing loneliness, isolation, and pain.

  I wasn’t supposed to read the letters—especially the last one—but I snuck them into the basement when my mother was at work, tried piecing together the parts of her that I knew little about. Their content was considered too adult for me, but even at the age of six or seven, when a vase would shatter against the wall and the chase continued into the bedroom, the thuds and shrieks making it apparent what was going on, I’d slip my feet into my mother’s abandoned shoes, tiptoeing through the field of shards, broom in hand. There were hints, clues in the chunky, ambiguous phrases and references to events in the letters, that told me vases were smashed when my mother grew up as well, though she likely held the dustpan back then. Sometimes the letters asked for forgiveness, other times they demanded it, but most often they pointed the finger at my grandmother, accusing her of provoking and prodding and pushing until the violence that he held tight beneath his skin erupted, usually with the assistance of alcohol. And while my mother contends that my grandmother never antagonized, her looking so much like a replica of the woman who initially broke his heart seems to have been enough for him to justify the abuse.

  When the war ended and my grandfather returned home, he continued his work with what became the air force, and soon after turned dependently to the bottle, then compulsively to the pen. I imagine him walking toward a bar on Saturday, the sun at its apex, his shadow stacked neatly behind him on the sidewalk, a block of shade, confident in its solidarity. By last call he’d stagger home in the dark with a bottle still swinging from his fist until he hurled it at a cat or a paper bag caught in the wind, the sound of the glass shattering resonating just loudly enough to remind the world that he existed, that he hadn’t turned into a shadow himself.

  Often I am lumped together with my grandfather in sentences uttered at family reunions, hushed asides of “You know, we had another writer in the family too.” The resonance of those whispers appears in my mother’s eyes whenever I speak of my habit of writing in a bar. While my laptop seems more evolved than his mass of scribbled-on napkins, I am aware that my pints are made from the same ingredients as the ones he drank alone. Sometimes I wonder when I first walk into a bar which seat he would’ve chosen if he were there; I wonder if the stool against the wall was his favorite too. I wonder all of this as I light a cigarette and ignore anyone who tries to speak to me, diligent and certain that my one task is simply to write.

  In addition to the letters I know about, I assume he wrote stories, though he just as easily could’ve written rants or essays; I’m only certain he wouldn’t have been a poet. I am sure, however, that his work was about the war and his bitter awareness of mankind’s absent humanity. I imagine he organized his work geographically, the stories moving through the emptiness of the vast eastern front to the trenched and heavily populated western one; or maybe his thoughts centered around food, his writing recounting memories of home-cooked meals, their spiced aromas filling his boyhood home, pitting them against standard Air Corps rations of tins of bully beef, Diamond Brand tuna, and hardened Arnold’s biscuits. He could have put things together according to the seasons, complaining of the bitter German winters, detailing the differences between the rigid expression on a frozen body’s face and that of the warm and malleable corpse of spring. Or maybe he scripted his words by recounting his mental stages, remembering the fresh excitement of finally flying into combat coupled with complicated grief for the human beings he shot, those that ran for their lives before collapsing flat into the earth in a plume of dust. His work would have traced his movement, his emotional state from naive young pilot to hardened realist, over the span of many pages, although maybe he was just too horrified to share them with anyone else. But more simply, his writing was likely about how untrustworthy people, especially women, are. Whatever his subject matter, he wrote from the day he got home from the war until he fixed a shotgun between his dry lips and used a makeshift stick his step-nephew crafted for him, supposedly to help him move objects in his room closer to him, to pull his last trigger.

  My own father had no war experience or disloyal first wife to justify how a man could carry around so much venom and pain from place to place. Instead my father jumped ship while in the Merchant Marine—a state-imposed military sentence in Greece—which, once he fled, helped perpetuate his paranoia. His fear of government imprisonment for his traitorous rebellion grew so deep that by nineteen he’d made his way to America in search of the kind of freedom that only people from other countries idealize—a belief so deep that it became an innate truth, not just another history-class concept. He embraced America as if the epigraph on the Statue of Liberty were written expressly for him, a solitary huddled mass.

  But something about that makes it sound innocent and misrepresented. Yes, he felt that America was the land of opportunity, but not so much for its constitutional guarantees as for its being the perfect place, maybe the only place, for a street-savvy man with infinite charisma to exploit the good-natured and hospitable extensions of the people he needed for survival. My mother was one of the first, a waitress who had long struggled with her weight, self-esteem, and troubled childhood; she served as the perfect person to pitch a campaign of false love on. I’d seen him haggle car salesmen down thousands of dollars on multiple occasions, men trained to be impervious, shaking their heads and my father’s hand as he talked them into an undoable deal. I can only imagine that my mother, who had never seriously dated a man, stood no chance against his persuasive platform of bullshit and charm.

  Photos of my parents from the early years show them grinning, stuffing clichéd cake into one another’s mouths. Smiles all around at taking me to the park for the first time as I fearlessly chased swans deeper into their pond. But the real trouble comes when one knows the end of a story first; now when I look back on those early, gleeful pictures, I see only a ruse. While my mother tells me there were moments of genuine happiness, I can never forget that my father needed a green card more than anything, and my mother, who was subsequently subjected to totalitarian ruling, was ripe for the picking. And like any actor worth his weight, he played the part of the family man convincingly for a time.

  Sit-down family meals were stressed as important in my childhood, always beginning with a prayer and sometimes ending with an Aesop’s fable thrown in for good moral measure. But it didn’t take long until, even when I was a very young child, I noticed his talking about specific waitresses too often. Casual droppings of Connies and Jennifers at our dinner table, each mention of their names making me more uncomfortable than when a sex scene crept on in a movie we were watching together. Soon after, the blame was placed on conflicting work schedules, and we sat down to eat together as a unit only a few times a week.

  “Can I have more potatoes, please?” My father held his plate toward my mother, though he was technically closer to the stove than she. He winked at my brother, Mike, as she rose and took his plate. “Did I tell you kids what Jenny said at work last night?”

  Mike and I exchanged a glance, a checks-and-balances system to figure out when things were rhetorical.

  “She’s so funny,” he said and ran his hand through his curls. My mother placed his dish, potatoes piled high, in front of him, and he smacked her ass lightly in appreciation. “She came up and said that there was this old guy at her table who kept pinching her, so she grabbed my arm.” He paused to flex his enormous bicep. “She said, ‘You’re the only real man in this place.’” He laughed proudly, his gold tooth showing, and turned to my brother, six years old at the time, and whispered playfully so we all could hear him, “Jenny’s one hot number.” He continued at regular volume: “Man, the other cooks weren’t happy after that. Especially Jenny’s boyfriend!”

  Polite smiles all around, but I kicked Mike under the table.

  “Can I have some more chicken?” he asked, and my mother rose to fetch.
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  My father spoke about Greece with fire, his accent thick as stew, recounting its perfect green sea, plentiful olives, and passionate people, but his descriptions were never concrete. Not really. It was more like listening to the recollections of dreams, that space of bleary disconnect, when he’d recall life in Crete, mixing his fact with fantasy just like they did in Greek school. In fact, until I was about twelve years old, I really believed in the Minotaur and Medusa, though I’d abandoned silly notions of Santa long before. The fiction was so intertwined with the facts that it seemed real. I never questioned it. And a shrine to his island, his Crete, hung on my parents’ bedroom wall and solidified the truth about the far-off land he called home. A painting proudly displayed the topography of Crete, a cluster of grapes in one corner, a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull in another. Only recently has it occurred to me that he really could have been from anywhere. I do think of him as quintessentially Greek in almost every way, but he could’ve just as easily watched three or four Russian movies and sold me on visions of vodka-drenched snow and tall bearskin hats. I rarely saw pictures from his childhood, though I knew he had two sisters, because they visited us in the States when I was a child. I never understood who lived in the house he grew up in—or even if it was a house. I had no idea what his parents did for a living or, for that matter, where my grandfather had disappeared to, since my father spoke only of my yia-yia. But more importantly, I never questioned those gaps. He seemed fabricated, a character sprung from the pages of Bulfinch’s Mythology, and though I’ve spent most of my life trying to deny the biological fact, he was indeed my father.

  When I was fifteen years old, before the divorce was final, before the police had to physically remove him from our home on that last court-sanctioned day, I had it out with him. His demeanor had always been a threatening one—biceps too thick for me to wrap my hands around—but anyone with a history of physical abuse can tell you that the temporary pain of getting hit is nothing; it feels deceptively avoidable and bruises fade. But the emotional and manipulative torture lingers, like an extra ingredient in the body that can never be shaken. Just a couple of months before the final eviction, my father and I, the only two at home, were in his bedroom, that shrine to Crete and Orthodoxy, and with the ruddy icons staring out from behind their encased glass, he threatened me with body blows as I jumped on his bed. When he raised his hand to hit me, a familiar bent elbow, a flash of knuckle, I used the give in the bed to spring into the air and kick him with both feet square in the center of his chest. As he fell back onto the dresser, loose change cascaded to the rug, the wobbling mirrors distorting our confrontation. I told him, yelled at him, for the first time, that I hated him: the first shouted smile of my life. Pure joy in defiance, in the bare truth of the word hate. And then, as he attempted to regain his balance, I grabbed my backpack and ran, spending the night in the woods across the street from our home, perched behind a log that allowed me to see my parents’ frantic search while it was too dark for them to see me. All fires need time to burn out.