Now the summer is almost over. I am going to be away for a few days in August and I write him to let him know that I can no longer hold the date. I don’t say anything else, just that. This morning there was a response. The windows he’d thought were open were now closed. That’s how he phrases it. As windows that close. He won’t be visiting after all.
Instead he suggests that we meet on Skype.
Skype. It seems obvious. But for as long as I can remember, communication between us was done exclusively in writing. During the course of my life we’ve talked on the telephone maybe five times in total. One of the first telephone conversations I can recall occurred in the spring following the summer that my head was growing too large to fit through the bars. We’d moved from an apartment in Farum into a smaller one in Østerbro, with two rooms en suite and a tiny bedroom facing the courtyard. My mother’s colleague assumed it was a four-room apartment and thought we got a great deal for two rooms and a suite plus a bedroom! But en suite wasn’t an extra room, and there wasn’t any and in front, en suite simply meant that the two rooms were connected by a glass door. My mother covered the glass door with a curtain, one room we used as a living room, the other became my bedroom, and my mother slept in the tiny bedroom. We shared the wardrobe in my room and on a shelf above the radiator sat the telephone my dad called one day.
Shortly beforehand, all of Denmark had learned a new word. No one in the black-and-white tv in the living room really knew where the emphasis was supposed to go, whether it was Cher-no-byl or Cher-no-byl. The journalists stumbled ahead using one or the other. In any case, a nuclear reactor had exploded there, and it was all over the news and everyone was talking about the catastrophe in Chernobyl, the Chernobyl accident, and he was on the other end of the line, my dad, he too wanting to discuss Chernobyl, and his suddenly calling like that was a huge surprise, bigger almost than the failing reactor. He was concerned. I stood facing the wall and held the receiver as if it were a chick I’d just found, whose breathing I was trying to hear. He said we shouldn’t drink milk. Milk, I wouldn’t have thought of that myself, and yet it was evident that the wind would carry nuclear waste from Russia to Denmark and pollute the stomachs of Danish cows.
Afterward, I bragged to anyone who’d listen about that phone call. How he’d called all the way from America. How he’d sat over on his side of the Atlantic worrying all the way to Østerbro about my mother’s and my possible milk drinking. And at the same time, the phone conversation demonstrated something else that I didn’t say, how easy it was for me to stand there and stare into the radiator in Østerbro, while he sat in St. Louis and talked about milk.
If it was so easy, why did a nuclear reactor have to explode for it to happen?
Another three weeks pass before we succeed in having that Skype conversation. He emerges on my screen at the arranged time. His face is dark, he sits before a window overlooking a luminous cliff bedecked in lush vegetation. He’s at the university in Madeira and they’ve given him an office right below the apartment they’d purchased on the island a few years back.
It doesn’t take long before the question bursts from me, the one that has tormented me all summer.
Does C not want you to see me?
It’s the first time I ask him so directly about his wife’s animosity. It’s a subject we usually avoid, but I go at him like a saw. For a few seconds he appears to be at a loss, searching for words. The stream of light falling through the window behind him is so bright that I can’t read the details in his face. His response is as unambiguous as my question:
No.
It is not a good conversation. I dissolve into tears, and he’s what, awkward? He doesn’t say much. I seek his eyes in the darkness. For a few absurd moments I feel like my dad’s mistress. Like there’s something furtive about our relationship and it’s obvious to others but I’m incapable of seeing it, and this is the unavoidable consequence of something that’s fundamentally wrong and unnatural.
In Linn Ullmann’s book about her father, Unquiet, the aging father tells his daughter that he’s become engaged. “I’ve heard that you’re jealous,” he says, and the daughter responds: “I’m not jealous. I’m not one of your women. I am your daughter. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to get engaged.”
It’s been more than forty years since my dad was engaged. Presumably, it happened before I learned how to talk. How could I, a baby in diapers, be against it? That’s how it’s always been. My dad has always been married to her, and he’s always had me. And now, more than forty years later, she, his fiancée, his wife, has decided that he may no longer see me, his eldest daughter.
Why, why?
Somehow, it feels that it’s on me to sell the idea of my company, that I am something he must be persuaded about.
But I don’t ask the question. Even as I sit in front of the computer screen, I decide that I don’t want to know the reason. I won’t facilitate any attempts to justify the irrational. I won’t lower myself into the mire.
Searching for meaning is pointless.
The windows have closed.
And between the words, in a place beneath what’s spoken, lies a message. Without your knowing, I have visited you for the last time.
And even farther beneath. I don’t have the energy for anything else …
◊
This is a new development. It has left me paralyzed on the inside. Days pass, weeks. There’s nothing I can do to change it. The whole thing slides, the book project, it’s as if my dad only exists on paper. Only there can he be my dad. In my notebook I have written the words: Paper Daddy. Meanly, I play with it as a title. And yet I can go no further. I have no desire to think about the book. Inaction, a lack of desire to continue. The words: despondent, glum, woeful. Old words, heavy as lead.
The memories flit. There’s something tangible about writing them down, they’ve taken shape, they’ve been birthed. When they exist on paper, they exist. They become things. His hands, the Chinese restaurant, the kite flying, the butterfly brooch. The visit to the Statue of Liberty. The fragments, the glimpses, they are among the most precious I have. That my dad is connected to seeing. The unexplainable, intimate connection between him and the acquisition of the visible world. And with it, also the description of it. Not so much the writing itself, but what comes before it. The inner inscription. Becoming conscious of the meaning of what is visible. It is something I’ve never told anyone, it is the most delicate I have. And now that it is written on paper, it feels flat and trivial. Like someone else’s treasure, not mine.
This morning when I read over my notes, I saw something different than what I saw then. Perspective changes, and so does the image. Something is lost on the way to the paper. I see the failure, not the fairy tale. Where did it go? And how do I find it again?
Is the father I remember the same one who Skyped me from Madeira? Is the father who visited me in Denmark the same one I walked into rooms with, the same one I sometimes stumbled into in the kitchen in St. Louis?
I can’t escape the feeling that it’s an image I’ve described, and not a real person. It’s a banal fact that we change. I change, my dad changes. The image changes. The anchor shifts. I can no longer find the anchor, I don’t know where I’m writing from. The six-year-old discovering her dad’s hands on the grass, or the forty-two-year-old crying on Skype, why, why?
Which one of my fathers am I writing about?
When I started, I had no idea how disorienting it would be. Behind it, so far away that I can only glimpse it, reality shimmers like a distant island. These incessant shifts, in geography, in time.
I sit on my shore, casting long glances.
The memories sparkle and grind together like chunks of ice. In the morning I wake up to it all over again, the emotions, the moments. It’s all intermingled, there’s no chronology. I can sit here before the terrace door, with my notebook in my lap, and outside the wind rustles in the cherry tree, the leaves are still green, but the birds hav
e eaten the cherries, and I can be there, right opposite my dad. He is forty-two, the same age as I am now. He is in the Chinese restaurant wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses, fumbling with the camera. I’m five, I’m six, I’m seven and eight. My mother sits beside me. I’m twelve, I’m fourteen. Now my mother doesn’t need to sit with us any longer. He’s there still, he has forgotten to remove the lens cap. He sits there, flickering in and out, wearing one of his turtlenecks and shirts, one that’s checkered brown and white, another checkered dark green, burgundy, he has removed his glasses and placed them on the table, first horn-rim then metal. I pin him down with language. I destroy my memory by pinning it in place. I crucify it on the page. I choose these words. I could have chosen others. I choose this moment. I could have chosen another. There is no chronology. It all happens at the same time, accessible to memory. It’s all linked though not necessarily connected. To put it down on paper is to put it in sequence. To put it in sequence is to postulate a connection. Unavoidably, I create an image that hardens. Over time, the memory becomes like vacation photos. I take out the photo album, look at it. It gets worn. X becomes Y. It becomes the journey. I leaf through the album and dream about what is just beyond the frame …
at this time last year, I sat at the impossible wicker table in my dad’s wife’s house in Belgium. There was just enough room for three of us, and because I couldn’t get my legs underneath the table, I alternated between sitting with them spread wide and gathered to one side like an eighteenth-century noblewoman on a horse.
We’d eaten, and we were full, and a calm moment arose when my gaze wandered toward the lawn. From where I sat, I could see the remains of what we’d eaten during the week, all the organic kitchen waste scraped from our plates directly into the rose bed.
Two golden skins from the smoked herring we’d eaten for lunch yesterday were hanging from the hedge that ran between the stone patio and the lawn. The smoked herring had been a special purchase, a gesture on her part, and she was angry when we didn’t eat the entire fish but left the skin on our plates. So we stayed put by the plates of herring skins she believed we should eat, and I thought of Sabrina who’d sometimes sat for hours on the tall barstool by the kitchen counter at Washington Terrace, hunched over the food she couldn’t bring herself to swallow.
While I sat there, I considered how fish skin was just as robust a material as every other type of skin, like leather you turn into shoes and bags and bound books, and I remembered something about how Brazilian doctors use fish skins to wrap patients with very severe burns. In an unobserved moment, while she was in the kitchen, we sneaked out to the yard, and my dad tipped the fish skins into the hedge.
For the cats, he said.
Even though we both knew there weren’t any cats, only the dog, Molly.
It’s been a year now. We were finished eating, and my dad poured the last of his beer into his glass and cleared his throat. How is your wine? he asked. It’s good, I said.
Na ja, she said, leaning back and looking directly at me, scrutinizing me closely. She was in a good mood. She was wearing the silk scarf I’d brought her from Copenhagen, the colors suited her, the blue tones matched her eyes. I told her this. She said that my books were on the shelf behind me. I turned, and there they were, three or four of them, even some anthologies, most of them in Danish. I assumed they were there for decorative purposes, she seemed satisfied to have them there, for show, just as satisfied as she once was to have my mother’s yellow painting hanging in her house. I’m continually surprised by this character trait of hers. If as a child I was greedy and spoiled, I was also sometimes clever and funny. Who I was depended on her mood, but merits and talents were fixed. They were irrefutable.
She said I was the child who’d made the most of herself. When your dad told me the newspapers announce your birthday, I knew it was true. You are famous! I told her that I definitely wasn’t famous. Writing books is a very humble occupation, and in my case also anonymous. But he showed me, she said. He showed me the newspaper.
In her eyes, there was no higher recognition than when a newspaper makes a point of stating you’re one year older. She beamed with pride. There was something pure about it, something genuine, not the kind of pride that implied she took any credit. I write books, my birthday is listed in the newspaper, and for that I earn her unreserved recognition.
Of all the childrön, she said, you turned out the most successful.
•
The room where I slept was used to store the ironing. On the floor lay a picture frame, its glass cracked, and a defective lamp with the cord wrapped around the base. Up close, most of the house seemed unfinished. The bathroom I’d been shown was farther down the hall, right opposite her bathroom, a repurposed kids’ room that might resemble a bathroom if you saw it in a photograph. The floor was laminate and sounded hollow when you walked across it. The tub was unconnected, an object for decoration, and the toilet wasn’t properly fastened, either. When I sat down on it, it clinked loosely against the thin underlayment. I had to be careful not to tip over.
No matter what I touched, it would rattle or fall apart. One day my dad and I took a few dirty plastic lawn chairs that stood under a lean-to and sat in the yard. We’d only been seated for a moment when his chair gave in, its legs just curved underneath him, and he fell backwards onto the flagstones. For an instant I thought this was the end of him. He wasn’t hurt, but lay on the ground, surprised and startled, like a giant beetle, protected only by the back of his chair’s hard plastic shield.
It occurs to me that the word dysfunctional means that things simply don’t function. A house with chairs you could not sit on, tables you could not sit at. We got different drinks that we drank from different glasses and ate different meals from different plates; my dad fried meat and potatoes, I some beans and vegetables set on a flowered plate, and she something indeterminable eaten with a spoon out of a green plastic bowl. There was no cutting board; my dad’s wife prepared the food, sliced onions or tomatoes with a blunt knife, directly onto the plastic plate onto which the meal in question would be served.
In this functional desert where nothing was as it seemed to be, and where nothing functioned according to the intention, my dad had carved small navigable paths for himself. He lived in line with set routines, with a table he could work at and a chair adjusted to his height. He had a private bathroom where the toilet was affixed to the floor, and the shower was the kind with running water. There was a bed for him to sleep in, and underneath the bed, concealed in a brown suitcase, he stored his personal possessions, his camera, some cash, that kind of thing. Maybe that was also where he stored the pale blue checkbook from my grandfather’s bank, out of which he wrote my birthday and Christmas checks. As far as I could tell, the suitcase under his bed was his island, his refuge, a place where he could reign …
She knew no one in Belgium, had no friends or family there apart from a sister who lived in the town, but after she’d moved there, they’d had a falling out and broken off contact.
One evening, over dinner, she told me how she’d come to buy the house when she’d visited her sister a few years ago. The sister had tried to convince her to move to Belgium and had taken her around to look at houses, and suddenly she’d just signed her name on a purchase offer.
My dad sat right across from me when she told the story, chewing his food and turning his beer glass and clearing his throat. It was impossible to say whether he’d heard it so many times that he’d stopped paying attention, or whether it was because the topic was uninteresting to him.
She explained how the rules for returning the house had surprised her. They wouldn’t let me return it, she said. I thought of the dresses that once filled an entire living room in St. Louis. She repeated what the real estate agent had said: Once the purchase agreement was signed, they couldn’t return the house.
Your father was furious, she said.
I looked over at my dad. He rotated his beer gla
ss, looked down at his plate, and muttered something about why you couldn’t just sign purchase offers, an angry bass rumbling just below her monologue, that she had plenty of properties to take care of, the house in St. Louis was falling apart, the money was leaking out, etc., but she didn’t pay attention to him.
When I asked him later why she suddenly moved to Belgium, he said: Oh, I think she just wanted to be able to talk to the people in the shops in her own language. Again, it seemed random, and it further confirmed the sense I’ve had of her since I was a child: that she’s happiest in supermarkets. Commenting on tomatoes in her mother tongue. After forty years in America with children and grandchildren who only speak English, she preferred to speak Flemish with the cashier.
Another time he told me that she’d actually been to Madeira to find an apartment for them. During a conference many years ago, my dad had fallen in love with the island. Subsequently he developed close contact with the university, and he’d visited the island several times with his wife, and they agreed they would find a place where they could move when they grew old.
So, when she went to Europe to visit her sister, she first went to Madeira to find a suitable apartment, she toured residences without making a decision, and afterward she’d flown to Belgium to visit her sister. And here, her sister had tried to convince her to buy a house in the town, they looked at houses, and after apartment hunting in Madeira, she had, in my dad’s words, been in the house-buying mood, and suddenly—suddenly—she’d come to buy a house in Belgium instead of an apartment on Madeira …
Writing teachers aren’t the only ones to think about the sudden. Kierkegaard was preoccupied with it, too. For what is the sudden? For him, the sudden was in opposition to the ordinary life, the ordinary continuity, he saw it as a form of disruption. Not as something that leans in toward us from outside (we look around, cross the road, and suddenly we’re struck by a bus), but as something that originates from within. A little like Freud when he later envisioned slips of the tongue as a kind of crack through which one could peer into a person, Kierkegaard saw the sudden as an expression of an involuntary revelation of oneself, a type of technical hitch in one’s state of being, a glance into a person who has no peace in his or her soul. The sudden, he says, is the perfect abstraction from continuity. The sudden is the at once cruel and humorous manifestation of what he calls self- enclosed reserve. The sudden has its own aesthetic, swiftness, horror, comedy, horror again …
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