Oh, Mom, you are gonna be real surprised now, says Carissa.
Mein Gott, is that you? I thought I saw a ghöst!
She begins to scold us for wearing shoes. When she’s done, she notices that my sister has grown taller than me.
I knew you would come back to St. Louis and study, she says.
I wasn’t planning to stay and go to college …
Why? Do you think skool is better in Denmark? Your legs are möch, möch skinnier than Carissa’s, but that’s because she rides her bike all the time.
I bike too, I say. A Danish specialty.
Yes, but your sister goes further.
The boyfriend looks like he’s seen a ghost. Lost in thought, he stares into the air. I look at him without making eye contact.
What are you looking at him for? she says. What is this? Is it some sort of secret signal or what?
The surprise unfolds in slow-motion, like petals on a flower, lazy and beautiful. My other sisters show up one by one. By late the afternoon we’re standing out on the sloping front lawn. The sun shines through the branches of the tall oak tree that line the road. Eugene returns with a backpack slung on his back. Pranoat and Kip arrive. Marcel is there. After a while, the only one we’re missing is my dad, and then he finally pulls into the driveway. When he sees us, he parks on the street, gets out of the car, and walks across the lawn toward us.
Oh, was it today? he says. When did you arrive?
She pounces on him like a raptor. Did you know she was coming, John?
Twilight is settling in, the sound of grasshoppers. Birds land in the oak tree near the road.
Well, I knew she would come … sometime.
A look of surprise is written on his face. He resembles a puppeteer whose cardboard stage has collapsed, who now stands with his puppets in his hands. Complicated ideas ricochet in the air. I presume we all have the same question: Why did he keep his daughter’s visit secret? I wonder if he wanted it to appear as though it wasn’t his fault I was here. If it’s a matter of it being someone’s fault. I feel like an inconvenience. Maybe his wife is thinking something similar. Maybe she’s been wondering if, by not including her in planning, he was trying to protect his daughter from her. Maybe she’s been asking herself the same questions as me. Am I really that bad? Or maybe she thinks it was something I orchestrated? I’m arriving in August, but can you not tell your wife? That I’m staying with Pranoat and Kip to avoid her?
He remembers that he’d happened to buy cold beer on his way home. It’s in the car. He goes down the slope and opens the trunk and tears the cans from the cardboard one by one, a cold Budweiser for anyone who wants one. The tension fades. It would be easier if he were better at lying, but at his core he’s Gussie’s good little boy. I knew she would come … sometime. What he’s lacking is a liar’s elegance, an amoral stamina to carry his own choreography through. Dance the steps when it counts.
I have my own complicated choreography going. I’ve imagined how we would sit on the dry grass underneath the tree at the university, quietly reeling in all that we’d lost. Like fishing on the shore of a river. But the telephone doesn’t ring at Pranoat and Kip’s house. I consider calling him. Or even suggesting that he invite me to lunch. Instead, I fan the flames of indignation with a variety of complaints about initiative. I’ve brought myself within reach, I tell myself. Nothing is required of him, or almost nothing, the only thing he needs to do is lift his hand and dial Pranoat’s number.
•
We’ve gone with Pranoat to the university to pick up some ink for a drawing project, and as I’m standing there, he strides past her office. That’s how we meet, coincidentally. He’s going downtown anyway, he says, to pay a speeding ticket. Do we have any interest in coming along to see the recently renovated Union Station? Okay. We drive with him and walk around the train station, which has been made into an exclusive shopping center. Recently he sent me a postcard from the crown jewel, the hotel in the old main terminal. Now we’re standing together in the lobby. Above us, the roof stretches in a high arch, it could be a European church. On the far wall, the history of St. Louis unfolds on a peacock tail that’s the same green as dollar bills.
The boyfriend doesn’t back me up when I tell him my dad is an idiot. It vexes me that we only meet when we stumble into one another, that it’s always a random occurrence with no actual initiative taken. But he defends my dad to me. He’s so kind and sweet, he says, as good as gold. There is not a mean bone in his body. Most of all I don’t feel we talk about anything relevant. What do you want to talk to him about? I don’t know. Something besides speeding tickets and train stations. The other day it was a bus trip to Rio. Again, I’d driven to the office with Pranoat. Pulling myself together, I’d walked to the end of the corridor. My old drawings still hung on his door, including the one in which his head emerges behind his stacks of paper and says Howdy to visitors. I opened the door and asked if he had any interest in talking.
Sure.
With great anticipation, I sat down beside him. The old metal table where we usually sat, consumed by our separate projects, the stacks of paper piled in towers around us. He started telling me about a 250-mile bus trip from São Paulo to Rio. He described every single hill, up and down, or so it seemed, and the cars they passed, and on which stretch the bus broke down, and how long it all took.
When I looked at him, he seemed so harmless. How could I be angry with him when he’s almost pitiable? Then I grew sad and regretted my thoughts. I had no idea what I was supposed to think about him. I needed someone to say: You are right. He is an idiot.
He ought to call. He ought to say something like, it’s so empty underneath the tree. He ought to ask whether we should sit down and reel in what we lost. Try, in the very least.
All of my sentences begin with these two words: He ought.
Or with these four: In the very least …
I thought it’d be easier not to live in the house, but if I want to see my siblings, their mother is an unavoidable intermediary. It’s impossible to lure my sister into riding her bike over to see me. It’s too hot, she says. Why don’t we ask my mom to drive us somewhere?
We get her to drive us to The Loop, but she forgets to pick us up. We stand on the street corner waiting for nearly two hours before we call Uncle Kip and ask him if he’ll drive us home. He drops my sister off at the house, and soon after, her mother returns, furious. It’s the last time I’m ever picking you öp again! Where were you?
It’s easier with my cousin, Little Chan. He’s moved from Texas to St. Louis and works as a display artist in Niemann Marcus. He lives in an apartment with a wall of exposed brick. He has baked a pizza, the table is set, and the lamps are hung so they don’t blind you. Your legs fit comfortably under the table. He lights candles. The sleeves of his T-shirt are rolled up in precise folds. The last time I’d seen him was the Christmas my dad burst into my room on me and Marcel. Back then, Little Chan had a girlfriend named Mimi. Like him, she was heavy, and she had an even softer voice than him. When they talked to each other, they sounded like two mice in a rainstorm. Since then, he’d lost weight, and there’s something about his eyes that doesn’t quite match his age. It’s as if some terrible truth is dawning on him. But his manner of speaking is just as soft as always. He refers to the guy he lives with as his roommate. There is, apparently, no word for the obvious.
My dad has tried to organize a bunch of Argentinian colleagues to help us during our first days in Buenos Aires. The few times the telephone rings, it’s about the Argentinians. Now there’s only a few days until we leave.
The day before, I borrow Uncle Kip’s bicycle and ride it to the university. The saddle is so high that I can’t reach the pedals. I have to cycle standing up, I’m the only cyclist on the broad, sleepy, and much too hot streets. At the front gate of the campus, I lean the bike against the wall, then head directly to his office.
Daddy, I need to talk to you, I say, and burst into tears.
&
nbsp; Sitting dumbfounded between his piles, he mumbles: Sure, sweetie, in the same frantic way as when he’s trying to catch a flight. He stands up and sits down again, and clears the paper from the chair beside him. Because I’m crying, my words are incomprehensible. In fact, I don’t know what I’m even trying to say, I’m angry at myself for losing control of my emotions, driven to it, I feel, by him, by his passivity, angry, my dignity flown out the window. Too late to coolly enter the door and speak haughtily about initiative. We sit for a moment and wait for me to catch my breath.
Why don’t we go outside for a bit?
I dry my face with the edge of my sleeve. No doubt he doesn’t want his crying child sitting here, his crying, foreign child on full display for all of his colleagues and all of his PhD students who could appear at any moment, and we walk down the stairs and through the long corridor with the framed photographs where I played when I was little. I push against the door, and then I’m outside. After the cool darkness inside the building, the sun and heat seem overwhelming. So much has been built on campus that I don’t really recognize it. We find a narrow path between two new buildings and sit down on a bench.
I start talking about the poultry shears. They’ve been on my mind, those poultry shears my mother couldn’t have when they were married. The nonexistent poultry shears, the poultry shears that weren’t there. A number of these kinds of things have begun to take up space in my mind, things that are lacking. Not because I’ve ever lacked for anything. My mother bore the burden. When he and my mother got divorced, I say, she came away with only me and one hundred dollars.
I had nothing.
You had the house.
That’s nothing.
You had the furniture.
That’s nothing.
What about the three cars? The Mini Cooper, the Lotus, and the white Corvette?
That’s nothing …
What does he mean that the house and the furniture and the three cars were nothing? Would he rather have had one hundred dollars and me? Or was it because the Corvette was later stolen? I don’t ask, instead, I change the topic to discuss my education. Will he help me? Of course, he says, but it’ll have to be on the same terms as with my siblings. Since I was a little girl, I’ve known that part of his employment contract with Washington University included that his children could go to the college without paying tuition, something that could easily ruin a family. With all of the kids he had, it must have seemed like an attractive deal, but Washington University has rigorous admission requirements. Of all my children, he says, you are the only one who could get into the place if you wanted to.
Many years later, I thought about the spot beneath the tree where we used to eat our homemade sandwiches, how it stood empty. How we never sat there. How we wasted the opportunity. Instead we sat boxed in between the two new buildings, a space so narrow that you could plainly hear the swish of pants from people passing by. Under the ground, I knew, some of the buildings were connected via corridors. Once, on the way from one building to another, just as we passed a metal filing cabinet someone had placed in the hall, he said that they stored some moonstones here that one of the Apollo expeditions had brought back. He meant here at the university, not here in the filing cabinet, but ever since then I imagined the moonstones lying in the drawers of some metal cabinet and not, as they probably were, as a priceless treasure in a hermetically sealed enclosure.
I had the idea that I wanted to go to art school. After taking a more mature look at St. Louis, I couldn’t envision getting my education here. It was too provincial, I was convinced, sheer Midwestern tedium spread across an all-too-vast area. I told him New York University had a good art school.
I said: Can I transfer my free spot to New York City?
He said: You gotta be kidding.
It angered him, not the art school part, but the part about New York City.
No sensible person would voluntarily choose to go to that city, he said. The people there—they just dream of getting away from that place. As any sensible person would do.
We sat in silence.
Did you hear what happened to the lady on the subway?
No, I said, I haven’t heard about the lady on the subway.
You obviously don’t care.
I said: If I worried about everyone who takes the subway my head would explode.
Nine years earlier, I’d walked around between the skyscrapers and held his hand. Only now did I realize how much he actually hated the city. That place. He couldn’t even say the name.
I, on the other hand, hated St. Louis. The broad empty boulevards, the monuments, the factories. He must have had delusions of grandeur, the city planner. It felt like living in an all-too-large, empty house, a house full of never-used rooms.
We sat on the bench. We’d worn ourselves out talking, and we were exhausted. Maybe we didn’t entirely disagree. With the tip of my toe I crushed a tuft of grass between two flagstones. He would help me pay for my education as much as he could, he said.
I’ll work something out.
I plucked a blade of grass and began to tear it lengthwise in two. I said that I’d come to give him a chance to meet me halfway. I’d needed a little initiative from his side. I’d been here for three weeks now, and he’d done nothing to see me. He could have called. He could have stopped by and picked me up. We could have had lunch.
I threw the blade of grass down and looked at him. He’d become very quiet. He sat slumped forward, thinking.
You’re right. I should have.
Then he repeated it: You’re right. I should have.
Later I said goodbye to him at his office. As he stood there, surrounded by stacks of paper before the chalky blackboard, he seemed like a withered old man. His lips were pale, and his face drooped. He’s getting old, I thought.
when i was in my early twenties, I received three phone calls over a period of a year and a half. The first came when I’d begun at the university, Roskilde University. It was late, and I’d just fallen asleep when the phone rang. Sleepily I picked up the receiver, my dad was on the other end, and I sat up in my bed, immediately awake. What’s happened? The last time he’d called, a nuclear facility had exploded.
I’m afraid I have some bad news, he said. It’s Peggy …
His sister was very ill, an incurable cancer. She was at a hospital in Texas right now. She was undergoing chemotherapy, and my dad had offered to donate bone marrow after the procedure was done, but the doctors hadn’t been too optimistic. They said it wouldn’t be necessary. She had only weeks to live.
Along with Gussie, Peggy had been in Minnesota, my dad explained, to visit Little Chan who now lived there. He too was sick, everything he ate went straight through him, and they’d flown up there to take care of him. In the plane Peggy had experienced some strong pains in her stomach, which she ignored. When she returned to Texas, the pains had spread to her back and legs. She called the doctor, but he didn’t think she needed to see him: It was probably just an irritable bowel. He prescribed something to manage the pain. In a matter of weeks, she could no longer walk. Peggy didn’t complain, it would eventually pass. In the meantime, Little Chan had become so ill that he’d taken a leave of absence from work and flown to Texas to be nursed by his mother. To get around better, Peggy ordered a wheelchair. From stomach pains to wheelchair, all in a short period of time, like fast cuts in a movie.
When the wheelchair was brought into the picture, Big Chan had had enough and said: This is all crazy, and he called the doctor and asked him to pull himself together. Obviously it was not an irritable bowel. Peggy was driven to a hospital whose specialty was cancer, and they admitted her. That’s where she was now, my dad said.
Is Little Chan still with her?
Well, yes, my dad said. Peggy’s illness has brought something else into light …
What?
Little Chan. He is sick, too.
I was silent.
I’m afraid he has aids …
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nbsp; I was still struggling to understand that Peggy was dying, and in the course of a few sentences, my cousin now had aids. Back then it was a terminal illness, slowly breaking down one’s immune system, I’d seen images of the emaciated, concentration camp-thin toothpick men who died gruesome deaths in their beds. There was absolutely no dignity in such a death. And Chan, he’d barely even begun to live his life, he was only slightly older than me. How long had they known?
My dad said it had all come to the surface the day Peggy was diagnosed. She had borne the secret alone. Little Chan was a homosexual, and Peggy had been the only one who knew.
Everyone knew! I said. I went with him and his boyfriend to a gay bar!
Well, my dad said. Nobody talked about it.
If it got out that he was sick, it would also get out that he was gay. So his mother had borne the secret of his illness too. Though my dad said nothing about it, it was between the lines: no one knew how Big Chan would react. Maybe it wasn’t just Big Chan, maybe it wasn’t really Texan to be gay, wasn’t really Southern. Our telephone conversation took place twelve or thirteen years before the premiere of Brokeback Mountain, and Little Chan had of course been Little Chan even longer. He was sixteen when he was infected; he’d worked in a flower shop, and it was the much older boss who had infected him. That was eight years ago now. My dad estimated that Little Chan had two years left to live. But it was clear Peggy would die before her son.
Five weeks later, the telephone rang again, and once again it was at the edge of night. This time I knew immediately that it was bad news. Peggy was dead, my dad said when I picked up the phone. She died at home, and the entire family had been with her. That is to say: Little Chan and Big Chan, it had been ten years since their daughter, Kendall, had died. During the last few days, the pain had become unbearable, and Big Chan had stayed awake to measure doses throughout the night. She died in her sleep, my dad said. By that point, the thin blood in her veins had transformed her gaze into a milky red haze. Blood flowed into her brain, and Peggy was flowing into her death.
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