by Mariah Carey
* * *
My father took surgical care with everything he did. His lifestyle had a truly austere quality: part military barracks, part Shaolin monastery. His kitchen was small and impeccably kept. The contents of his pantry were precisely indexed by size and category. There was no room for extravagance or waste of any kind in his home. There were no multiples of anything: one TV, one radio. In his closet hung just the amount of shirts needed for a week, nothing more. He didn’t consider a bed properly made unless the covers were tucked in so tightly that you could bounce a quarter off its surface.
My father’s approach to most things was efficient and militaristic. He considered the act of snacking frivolous. If I was hungry while waiting for dinner, he would give me one Ritz cracker. One. The allure of that bright-red box, with its iconic swirl of golden, sunflower-shaped crackers rising out of their wax sleeves, was intoxicating. He would pull out one tall column of crackers, undo the meticulously folded sleeve top, slip a single cracker from the stack, and hand it to me delicately, as if it were a precious gem. Then he would carefully refold the paper, slide the stack back into the box, and return it to its place on the shelf, where it would stay.
I’d hold the buttery, salty, crunchy goodness up to my nose, close my eyes, and breathe in one long, luxurious sniff. With precision, I would take one teeny-weeny bite along the scalloped edge. I’d chew ever so slowly, letting the savory sensation linger on my tongue. Turning the golden treasure ever so slightly, I would nibble off another little piece of the edge, relishing every grain of salt and crumb, making my one cracker last as long as I could. (Ironically, the slogan on the box was “there’s only one Ritz”—and for me, there really was!)
By today’s standards my father would have been considered a hipster. After the military, he moved to Brooklyn Heights, drove a classic Porsche Speedster, and prepared authentic Italian dishes in his kitchen. Oh, how I lived for my father’s cooking! He made a mean sausage and peppers, and delicious parsley meatballs, but his linguine with white clam sauce was sublime. The scent of garlic in hot olive oil, boiling pasta, and the salty sea are what the best Sundays smell like to me. I loved Sundays. Those were the days I spent with my father—and our meals together were what I looked forward to the most.
One Sunday, my father’s mother, Addie, was there—a rare occasion. I don’t think I was more than five years old. It began as a typical Sunday, my father spending the entire day meticulously preparing his signature dish. He shucked and cleaned every clam, sliced the garlic, and chopped the aromatic flat Italian parsley. It was such a process—a ritual, rather. As per usual I hadn’t eaten all day, save maybe a Ritz cracker (and I probably hadn’t had a full meal the day before; Saturday night at my mother’s house could be a bit haphazard). Between reading and coloring and tummy rumbles, I eyed the pantry. The air was perfumed with the freshness of my father’s ingredients. I’d waited all week, waited all day; I just needed to hold out until dinnertime. Soon I would be reveling in my favorite dish.
I smelled the pasta softening in the boiling water and knew it wouldn’t be long. “It’s dinnertime!” my father finally sang. I jumped up and rushed to sit at the small Formica table in the kitchen. Addie, with a fabulous red wig and a red printed caftan to match, was on a tangent, telling some story only the grown-ups would be interested in. I could barely hold my head up, as I’d probably started to swoon and drool waiting for the deliciousness that was about to appear before me. I watched my father put the pasta on my plate, then scoop up the heavenly sauce and artfully pour it around the linguine. I followed his every move as he lowered the steaming white plate down in front of me. It was time! And then, just as I was picking up my fork, Addie—who had not paused in her story to take a breath—whipped out a green canister of grated Parmesan cheese and proceeded to shake its unsavory, powdery contents all over my elegant fresh linguine.
Noooooooo!!!!!! I screamed in horror. But it was too late; my plate was covered with it. My father never put that cheese on white clam sauce! Where had it even come from? Did she have it in her pocketbook?! Unable to control my shock and revulsion, I ran to the bathroom, slammed the door, and exploded into tears. “Roy, you better make her eat that pasta. Make her eat that food!” I heard Addie telling my father in defiance. That was the only time I remember my father’s perfect pasta being foiled, and I think it was the last time Addie joined us for Sunday supper.
My father taught me that words have meaning and thus, they have power. Once, on a lovely summer Sunday afternoon, I heard the faint jingle of the ice cream truck coming down the street outside my father’s house. Upon recognizing the mystical melody that promised so much pleasure, I let out an excited cry: “Aaaaa! The ice cream man!” The song was loud and clear now, so I knew the truck had stopped somewhere nearby. The pattering of running feet and the happy squeals I heard confirmed it—the ice cream man was right outside our door. My mind was racing. I gotta go! I thought to myself. He’s going to leave!
“Can I borrow fifty cents, please, please?!” I nearly shrieked at my father, dangerously close to hyperventilating.
“Do you want to borrow fifty cents? Or would you like to have fifty cents?” he replied in a cool, calm tone.
A mild panic was creeping in. “Uhhhh,” I stammered. I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was that I had to get some money for the ice cream man. “I don’t know!”
I wasn’t thinking clearly. Again, my father spoke in a patient, level manner that only enhanced my frenzy.
“There’s a difference between borrowing and having. Are you asking me to give you fifty cents?”
I was in a state and unprepared to make distinctions at that moment, so I blurted out, “I just want to borrow fifty cents. I’ll give it back! Please!”
He reached in his pocket, pulled out two shiny silver quarters, and dropped them in my anxious little palm. Like the occasional Ritz cracker, they felt like precious jewels. I burst through the doors of the building, barely touching the steps, and ran to the truck like a gazelle being chased by a lion.
I had gotten my ice cream, but my father made it clear I would have to repay the money I had borrowed. At seven years old I wasn’t earning any money yet, so I asked my mother for the quarters. She couldn’t fathom why my father would barter with his little girl, and she gave them to me. They had always had opposing parenting styles. I kept my promise and gave the money back to him the next Sunday. The ice cream man incident was a lesson not only in respecting the meaning of words but in integrity and money management. My father was a man who had saved the very first dollar he ever made.
Being a single father was a fairly new notion back then, so he wasn’t prepared to plan girlie playdates or fun, child-centered activities. For the most part, I was simply the child accompaniment to his regular adult life—keeping busy and out of the way as he cooked, cleaned, and tinkered with his car while listening to football on the radio. And he adored his Porsche. It was his only true luxury. He bought two of them in his lifetime, one before children and one after, both used. His Speedster was apparently always in need of some sort of repair, so he was always messing around in it.
The car was in a perpetual state of being “prepared” for full restoration. It was a vague, matte noncolor, because it was covered in gray primer, not paint. I once asked him why the color of the car was so dull. He explained that it was primer, but that the original color had been candy apple red. “Oh, so one day you’re going to make it candy apple red?” I asked.
“They don’t make that color anymore,” he said flatly. I was confused. Why not just make it another color, then? But if it couldn’t be the original color, he’d rather it not be any color at all.
He was incredibly patient with the Porsche, spending hours with it, believing deeply in its exotic beauty and high performance. It was very cool and chic—a soft-top convertible with two seats. He loved the freedom of putting the top down and the intimacy of only having room for one passenger. We would go on long drives
without much chatting. If the radio was on, it was tuned to the news (“1010 Wins—you give us ten minutes, we’ll give you the world”). Every now and then we would sing one of those funny, folksy songs that go on and on, like “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.”
There’s a wart on the frog, on the bump, on the log,
in the hole in the bottom of the sea
He also liked to sing “John Henry,” a folk song about a Black man who worked as a “steel-driving man.”
John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his Daddy’s knee
When he would sing “knee,” he’d hit an impossibly low note that would always make me laugh. I liked singing those songs because they would help the time and the miles go by. Back then I thought just driving was such a bore. But now, oh, what wouldn’t I do to sit next to him, one more time, in those leather seats, on the open road, with just the hum of the engine and the swishing of the wind as our accompaniment. My mother, the opera singer, taught me scales, but my father taught me songs that made me laugh.
Thank you for the mountains
The Lake of the Clouds
I'm picturing you and me there right now
As the crystal cascades showered down
—“Sunflowers for Alfred Roy”
Occasionally we would go to Lime Rock Park, a racetrack in Connecticut. It was a slightly more glamorous experience than a typical NASCAR venue. Paul Newman had a team there, and world-class drivers like Mario Andretti were regulars. I found the racetrack pretty boring, but going to the races was a favorite activity for Alfred Roy, and he made all of his kids join him. This was one rare thing we kids all could agree on: cars going around and around in a circle wasn’t high entertainment.
When we were on our drives or at the racetrack, I was often just around while he did regular adult things. While he listened to or watched football (which he loved, and which I found extremely boring) I would be close by, quietly reading or drawing—observing the ways of an adult.
My father did have a few books just for me in his house. The one I remember most distinctly was about a little Black boy who was blind. The cover was white, with large red, orange, and yellow circles. It was full of colors and told the story of a boy who saw the world through touching and feeling shapes, rather than through color.
When I think of that storybook, I think of Stevie Wonder. Reading it, I wondered if this was the reason why Stevie Wonder could create such vivid worlds and emotions through his songs: he was seeing without eyes; he was seeing with his soul. Stevie Wonder is by far the songwriter I respect and love the most. He is beyond genius; I believe he writes songs from a holy place. I think that having this book about the blind Black boy was one way my father attempted to introduce the concepts of racism and perception to me, because we really didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about the shades and the shapes of us.
Perception was also very important to my father. Once, while drawing alongside him on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I made what I thought was a very clever cartoon. It was a picture of our family with the caption, “They’re weird. But they’re okay.” But when I showed it to my father, he got really upset.
“Why would you say we’re weird?” he demanded. I was shaken by his stern tone, and I had no idea why the idea made him angry.
“I don’t know. I probably heard it somewhere,” I said. In my cartoon I had also added, “But they’re okay,” which I thought was optimistic. It was a little tongue-in-cheek.
With an absolute seriousness that chilled me, he said, “Don’t ever say that.”
I never intended to offend him, in fact, I’d wanted to delight him. I felt really bad that day. But the heavy load he carried, his deep desire to be accepted as a full human being, was something I wouldn’t learn about until much later—something I am still trying to make peace with.
At the time, I didn’t have the language to tell him that weird was how I felt. I didn’t know how to say that was how I felt other people saw us—as weird. I thought everything was weird. My hair was weird; my clothes were weird; my siblings and their friends were weird; my mother and all the shabby places we lived with her—they were all weird.
I thought the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship was a weird church. We had started attending when the family was still together. The five of us would go to this old medieval-style stone castle with thick walls and a tall tower, filled with a congregation of what looked like every odd person on the Island. To my little-girl self it appeared like the Church of Misfit Toys at a Renaissance fair. The pastor, who was formerly Jewish, had changed his name from Ralph to Lucky. “Reverend Lucky?” Okay. The teens would go up in the tower and do whatever weird things teens did. Even as a little girl, I knew this was not my scene. But my father, though the only Black person, felt like he was accepted there among the other outsiders, so he stayed at the fellowship forever.
I don’t think my father understood how different we were from everyone in the neighborhoods I lived in with my mother. It was weird to be living in a makeshift apartment on top of a deli when everyone else lived in a house. We lived in a small commercial section of Northport where there was a strip of stores on the ground level of a cluster of Victorian houses. They were small-town businesses: a bicycle shop, maybe a general store, and then the deli. A staircase alongside the deli’s entrance led up to a small, dim railroad-style apartment where I lived with my mother and Morgan.
I had a room at the end of the hall, no bigger than a typical walk-in closet. The apartment was small, the floors were covered in pea-green carpeting, and the walls and doors were thin; the sound of laughing and voices often kept me awake at night. I had very few things in that tiny room that brought me comfort. The most precious, perhaps, were gifts from my father—a little ceramic bunny and a sweet molasses-colored teddy bear named Cuddles, which I kept until it was destroyed many years later after a flood in a Manhattan apartment that was on top of a bar and nightclub (apparently, there are levels to living on top of establishments, and I have gone through all of them).
I remember when you used to tuck me in at night
with the teddy bear you gave to me that I held so tight
—“Bye Bye”
Even with Cuddles by my side, I frequently had nightmares, and it was in that dismal apartment where my troubles with sleep first began.
I don’t recall anyone else living around there, and there were certainly no other Black people for miles. Morgan’s was the only Afro in sight. Once, after he got in trouble, my mother meekly admonished him to “stay in his room.” Shortly after, the owner of the deli downstairs called my mother to inform her that he was watching her son jump from rooftop to rooftop above the other stores. Morgan had climbed out of the window onto the roof and was making a daring escape. He eventually went through a phase when he shaved his head bald and would wear karate pants, with a snake casually draped around his neck. He would walk through the town looking like a punk ninja, full of anger, hoping to find a fight. Even without his hair he was impossible to miss.
My father might not have liked me calling the Careys weird, but weird things certainly happened to us. Every now and then, Alison would crash into the apartment like a meteor, and friends of hers and Morgan’s would hang out all night.
One night Alison booked me as the entertainment. Earlier that day she’d taught me the song “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. It was an odd selection for sure, but I figured maybe she liked it because the refrain of “Go ask Alice” sounded close to her name. When I was brought out to the living room to perform, all of the lights were out, and I was surrounded by burning candles and a circle of teenagers (as well as my mother). Watching Alison’s face for approval, I let out the first verse:
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that Mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall
A song about taking drugs and tripping is not typical (or appropri
ate) lyrical content for a little girl. But I sang it because my big sister taught it to me. I loved nothing more than learning and singing songs, but this one was full of scary images (“the White Knight is talking backward /and the Red Queen’s off with her head”) and what seemed to me like creepy nonsense (“the hookah-smoking caterpillar”—what?).
Of course, I wondered what this song was about and why I was singing it in the dark. It was past midnight, and while all the other kids my age were nestled in their beds, I was belting out, “Feed your head!” for a candlelit gathering of wannabe-hippie teens conducting a pseudo-séance. Tell me that’s not weird.
* * *
“See you next Sunday!” That was our thing. My father and I gave that little promise to each other with a wave each week as I left him to return to life with my mother. But as I grew a little older, my seriousness as a singer-songwriter began to swiftly envelop my whole world. I was in the profession by the time I was twelve. My father did not see it or support it, largely because he did not understand it.
Music, as a career, was not logical to him. When I talked about writing poetry and singing, he would shift the conversation to grades and homework. He didn’t see the focus and discipline I was cultivating as an artist. He didn’t see how I was learning the craft, sitting in on jam sessions with accomplished jazz musicians with my mother and developing the skills of scatting and improvisation. He never saw how I spent hours writing, enriching my ear, and studying popular music trends on the radio. Above all, we had a fundamental difference in belief: I followed my heart, while he was guided by his fear of not being accepted. From that awful and auspicious day when Nana Reese laid her hands on me and spoke into my heart, I truly believed anything I wanted was possible. It was real to me. Absolute. My father did not believe anything was possible. On the contrary, he expected the world to vehemently deny his desires, not the least of which was dignity.
