That red light makes it look like The Shining in here…
I stopped mid-step and mid-sentence. My father stood in front of me, his arms open, waiting for me to embrace him. Except the man in front of me didn’t look like my father. He was half his weight. His boxers and T-shirt hung off of him. His head a large stone, precariously balanced. He held a cigarette in one hand.
Wow.
How was the drive?
Stephen, you…You lost a lot of weight.
He was running. Five days a week (But your knees…you’ve never been able to run). That was the yoga, of course. His instructor was a cute blonde, just his type, unsurprisingly. They were going to do Longs Peak, I remembered climbing Longs Peak with him, didn’t I?
I did remember. I hugged him, tired.
He was also cutting back on the drinking. The weight just fell off. The smoking helped him not drink. Very French, right? He hadn’t had gout in years (You just had it in Rome. In January). He laughed. God, he had forgotten about that. Did I remember those elephant ankles in Rome, wasn’t that hilarious?
I did. I moved toward my old room. I’m exhausted.
Everything in my room was in boxes. My father was selling the house and “moving to town,” which meant twenty minutes away in Boulder. He told me if I didn’t get my stuff out he was going to throw it away, but I didn’t know how much of this I could take back to my apartment at Kenyon.
You remember this old place?
I shrugged. Touched the sheets, expected to feel more, but those boxes made my life in Colorado recede. It was that room in which I wrote so many angsty stories and poems, where bats flew in the screenless windows and made me scream. Tonight it felt like none of that actually happened.
My father didn’t want to sell the house, but it was tough times. He wanted to finally finish the pool, but this would help, this would bridge the gap between jobs, plus he was a bachelor again. He wanted to be able to walk to the coffee shop, be out on the town, mingle. But he did love this house. He might buy it back. Did I remember those Fourth of July parties where he shot off the illegal fireworks and the neighbors called the cops? He had to bring those fireworks in from Nebraska. We, his kids, had loved them, did I remember?
I did. Can you not smoke in here? It makes me sick.
When he swerved leaving the room to extinguish the cigarette, I thought he was pretty drunk. I changed quickly for sleep from the backpack I brought in. He was back in my doorway in what felt like seconds, holding a large stack of yellow legal pads.
This lawsuit is really heating up. He gestured to the legal pads and sat at the edge of my bed.
Oh, he couldn’t say too much about it, but there were dirty dealings, and he was at the top. Seventeen years at the company. He knew too much. They laid him off, but now he was the whistle-blower on this whole case, and though he’d been advised not to talk about it, he could talk to me about it because I was his daughter, he was looking at clearing…millions.
Wow. I sat on my bed. So I’m super tired. I had to leave Nancy this morning. And we leave early in the morning—
About the morning. Did I remember Donna?
Do I remember your girlfriend of five years who I desperately wanted you to marry? Who was way too good for you? And I cried for a week when you guys broke up? Yeah I remember her.
Donna still loved him. That’s the truth. He had seen her recently and she was asking about me. He told her all about me, my prestigious university, how I was moving to New York after I graduated. He also took that opportunity to tell Donna that she was the only woman he had ever loved.
Stephen, I said quietly. Now I thought he must be very drunk. You guys broke up years ago.
He corrected me. He had lost track of Donna but imagined it was more a “break” than “breakup.” She didn’t want any contact, at least that’s what she said, but you know women, they don’t say what they mean. Anyway, he found her. He had been having his ex-wife Kelly followed, and he used the same guy, a private investigator (Are you joking?) and a former aerospace guy, like himself, anyway, this guy helped my father find out where Donna was working, and found out that she was engaged. Engaged! My father was insulted. So he decided to surprise her at her office, he waited for her at her car, and boy was she surprised. He looked great, at his fighting weight, and she was thrilled to see him. This was when she asked about me. But he had other news for her, some dirt on her new fiancé. They shared a doctor in Boulder, the best guy in Boulder, Donna’s fiancé and my father. My father had flirted a little with the doctor’s secretary, he took the woman out to dinner a few times, slept with her (What?). I knew how it all worked, didn’t I? Well this secretary pulled this guy’s file for my father, the fiancé’s file. And now my father had to tell her the truth, didn’t he? Wasn’t that the only thing to do?
Vasectomy! my father declared. He started laughing. Can you believe that?
I looked at my father, closely, in the light, for the first time since I had arrived.
What happened to your skin? I whispered. My father’s neck, up to his cheek and into his scalp, was dotted with swollen red lumps, some of them broken and scabbed, other larger patches scaly and flaking.
Hives, he said. He sighed. I’m on steroids to clear them up, but it’s reacting badly with my skin.
I moved closer. You’re picking the hives?
They itch, he said, covering one with his hand.
I can put some calamine on them. Will that help?
I kept my eyes averted from the mirror in the bathroom where I found the calamine. Everything seemed to be in its place: there were essential oils I had used in the bath in high school. Nail clippers where they used to be. I noticed my hands were shaking. Maybe, I thought to myself, I’m overtired from the drive. I had that familiar dissociation, where I felt far from the house, outside my body. I came back into the room and sat behind him as he looked at a legal pad, covered from first to last page with his own writing. I counted seven of them.
You take good care of me, he said, his voice calmer. We had a good time, didn’t we?
I nodded. As I worked on one sore, he reached up and scratched another. A scab popped off and a small burst of blood snaked into the pink lotion. I bit my lip. I quieted my breathing and used the voice I used on my mom in the hospital.
We did have a good time. We were like two bachelors living out here. We had some nice walks, some great parties. We did all right.
I plastered my father’s neck and temples in pink lotion. I blew on it to dry. He was motionless for the first time since I had walked up the stairs. The scab he had picked was still bleeding, the blood about to hit his shirt collar. I told him I had to grab a tissue and his body recoiled. He left and returned to my room holding tissues to his neck, smearing the pink.
Donna, it turns out, was shocked that her fiancé had had a vasectomy. He was promising her kids. Shocked. A massive betrayal. My father then mentioned to her that I was coming through town in a few weeks, and well, she very much wanted to see me. She wanted some alone time with me, but he’s thinking that she and I could get some breakfast tomorrow and he could pop in at the end. Surprise her again. What did I think?
No, I said.
You could do a favor for your father. His voice hardened. I knew what was coming. He could be cruel when he was drinking.
After all the bullshit I’ve put up with from you. After I saved your life. You’d be dead if I hadn’t rescued you from your mother. The fortune I’ve spent on you. Cleaned up all your messes. How do you think you got into college? You can’t possibly think you deserve to be there? Whose money was bailing you out? You can’t do a simple favor for your father?
I can’t, Stephen. I surprised myself by wanting to cry even though I had heard this entire rant many times before. I think you’re drunk.
He didn’t hear me. He was spinning through
his pages. There, there it was. He had been writing Donna poems. Did I remember that he had studied poetry? He loved Chaucer. He had wanted to be a writer too; did I remember that? He wasn’t spoiled though, not like me. He had to work.
I work, I said, barely whispering. He held some pages aloft and started reading:
Tonight, I can write the saddest lines…
Pablo Neruda, I thought. He thinks he wrote a Pablo Neruda poem. I listened to him read it all the way through.
I told him that Donna would love it and maybe I could have a call with her if it meant that much to him. I asked him if I could borrow an Ambien and when he went to his bathroom, I went downstairs, keeping the lights off. When I hit the bottom stair, I stepped again, and I stepped again. I looked to the cupboards for help. What is happening? I put on water for tea. I made two cups of mint tea and went back up the stairs and tried to make myself thoughtless. There was fear but no cognition. I thought maybe on top of the drinking he had mixed pills that shouldn’t be mixed. I understood that his behavior was the result of something chemical gone wrong, but I didn’t have the courage—the strength?—to speculate. When I thought about calling someone, I couldn’t think of whom to call.
I came back into my room, and my father was lying in my teenage bed, all the lights on, the sheets thrown off. His legal pads stacked next to him. He rested against the pillows and seemed to be asleep. There were two pills on the nightstand. I replaced them with a cup of tea for him and sat down on the floor. He snored lightly. I burned my mouth on the tea and took another sip, tonguing the immediate blister on the roof of my mouth. I noticed that my father’s legs had the hives as well. I noticed that his testicles had fallen out of his boxers, making him as naked and vulnerable as I’ve ever seen him.
And still, I wanted nothing but to get back to school. I wanted to excise the memory of nursing my mother, to believe that one of my parents was okay. I was so focused on surviving, I did not think about my safety. My father and I started our drive the next morning at six a.m., and I pretended the night before hadn’t happened. Forgetting, for me, was the equivalent of loving.
* * *
I can recall with harrowing clarity images of that drive to my senior year of college. What I cannot recall is how I felt beyond the fear, and even that is fuzzy. Here’s what I know:
His knees bounced like a marionette’s while he used them to pilot the car, his hands fanning the pages of his attaché case, open on his lap.
His cell phone never stopped ringing.
Something was wrong with the sale of the house. Someone had fucked him over. He needed the sale to close.
We stopped for him to use the bathroom every two hours, sometimes every hour.
He had two realtors working on the sale of the house. They didn’t know about each other, until they did. I listened to him berate one woman, only to jump on the phone with the other and call her a fucking moron.
He threw a half-full water bottle at my face because I had interrupted his phone call by asking him to pull over because he was scaring me.
He was sick in the bathroom of a gas station in Kansas.
He said it was the steroids, or an illness, maybe a stomach bug. I suggested he see the doctor as soon as we got to campus.
He was still yelling into his phone, attaché case still open in his lap, when he swerved onto the grassy center median and swerved back onto the highway.
I screamed at him, pounded the windows, the dashboard with my hands, demanded he pull over. He let me drive after that. He broke up bits of Ambien in front of me and slept, a hulking adult, tangled in his seat belt, mouth wide open.
We stopped in St. Louis but there was no steak dinner. We checked into a Hilton in the middle of the afternoon. He drew the blackout blinds and crawled into bed while I read in the bath. I ate a vending machine bag of Doritos for dinner.
He checked into the Kenyon Inn on campus and said he would see me in the morning. We were supposed to go to Walmart to pick out a lamp and some sheets for my apartment. He promised he would see the doctor. I went to get him the next morning and he was gone.
I had the presence of mind to call my cousin James. My ex-stepmother, Kelly. I said he was having a mental breakdown. That he seemed dangerously disconnected from reality. They said they would keep an eye on it.
And still, I didn’t have a vocabulary for what was happening. I didn’t know how to explain anything to my boyfriend, my friends. I glossed over it with a joke, You know my dad. Carly’s mother bought me sheets.
Hygiene, Colorado
The first time I can remember spending more than a few minutes with both of my parents in the same room was my high school graduation. My father—ever a showman—threw a massive party at our house in Hygiene. There were apple blossoms all over the lawn and cherries in the trees, all the drenched colors of late spring. My best friend in Colorado came into the house and raised her eyebrows, saying, Look at all this family you have! After knowing me for two years, she thought of me as parentless: estranged from my mother, and with a father, whom she saw sometimes, hardly more than a specter.
I know, I said, surveying them. They love a party.
My mother and I were tensely polite. I could be magnanimous because I had won. She had tried to punish me, and look at this place: the rust-colored foothills, evenings that flew with the geese, the delicate air. I had absorbed my father’s superiority. I learned from him to call Los Angeles an intellectual backwater. I watched her and my aunt take in the derelict hippies on Pearl Street, the co-op markets, the athleisure wear, with barely contained disgust. I thought them snobs. You guys should go on a hike, I told my mom with a straight face, and my sister and I laughed through our noses.
What do you think will happen, Christina and I asked each other, when our parents have to spend an evening together? We put money on both of them getting drunk, our father trying to tease our mother, or worse, trying to tease our aunt, who might or might not actually murder him regardless of witnesses. Our mother would become grim and say something nasty. She was, after all, so bitter, and such a bitch. Christina and I were fortressed off from feeling. What else could we do?
At the party, my father lifted up his gin-and-tonic tumbler and chimed it with a fork. I rolled my eyes at my sister. This man loved giving a fucking speech. He had written a poem, one that teased me and congratulated himself for surviving me. He laughed at his own jokes about my destructiveness. But after the poem he became serious. He looked around the crowded room and said that he wasn’t sure this day would come. Two years ago, living in California, my prospects had been bleak. He realized he had a role to play: that he could take me in—as he had taken in other strays in the family—and help me turn my life around. He knew he had to save me. Now look at her. Off to Kenyon College. She’s going to be a writer!
Everyone in the room turned and looked at me. They raised their glasses at me. My mother didn’t but most everyone else did. My friend came up to me and sighed. Your dad’s a piece of work.
What she meant was that I hadn’t gotten into college. I graduated from my private high school having been rejected or wait-listed by every university I applied to. Even with my test scores on the SATs and my AP English class, my GPA was garbage. I had failed multiple classes in California and continued to earn average grades in science and math. The rejections included state schools like Colorado State and Long Beach State. The truth is that on the day of this party, I had a job as a barista and an acceptance at the community college in Boulder.
There was, of course, the wait list at Kenyon. A liberal arts school in the middle-of-nothing Ohio—renowned for their writing program—that my high school English teacher had attended. That teacher fought to get me an interview with the dean of admissions. He also got them to accept my short stories, which I wrote prodigiously under his guidance, with my application. God knows how else he begged them, but the cred
it that evening surely belonged to him. I did secure an interview. The only problem was that my father wouldn’t take me. Whether he was busy with work, or simply didn’t believe I would get in, he was not available to visit the one college I had a slim chance of obtaining admission to. At the eleventh hour, my father’s sister, my aunt Wendy, flew with me to Ohio, drove me to Kenyon. She took one look around the campus and said, This is where you’ll become a writer.
But that day at my father’s party, the letter inviting me to Kenyon was still weeks away from arriving. I was familiar with my father’s exaggeration, his harmless white lies. The reason this memory haunts me is thinking about my mother listening to this parable of heroism. The way he manipulated me and everyone around him into believing he was a savior, the way he made an outcast of the woman who gave up all of her aspirations to raise me and tried—I know now that she tried—to love me. She had to watch everyone raise a glass to my father, to say behind her back that it really was incredible, what he was able to do with me. It is no wonder, my sister says now, she hated him.
Laurel Canyon, California
My book went into the Library of Congress today.
Impressive, the Monster says.
And I bought a new computer, I tell him. I’m going to write another book.
He’s proud of me. But then there’s nothing more to say about it, and we write dirty texts about all kinds of fucking.
Yesterday I called my therapist from my parked car on Beverly Boulevard, where I had meant to get lunch, but I couldn’t eat, why would I ever eat, because he had done it to me again. Again. It was an anniversary of the affair yesterday and he sent flowers.
The impact of most crashes is immediate, the card read. This has been much worse. Love, the Monster.
My book went into the Library of Congress under the category: “Self-Realization in Women.”
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