The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  What she needs to do—badly, according to Sandra—is to stop thinking. Inside her head, Sandra says, is not a good place for her to be at this point. Actually, she said “at this point in time,” but Daphne didn’t correct her. Obviously, she has trouble getting out of her head. That’s why Sandra has her writing the letter or whatever it is she’s doing in her notebook. When she’s not writing, she should be either exercising or resting, to get those beta-endorphin peptides sludging around in her body again. She mostly rests, because exercise isn’t exactly her strong suit. She doesn’t do gym. She could, she supposes, go for invigorating walks, but she’s pretty much under house arrest here. She knows that’s not literally true. If she wanted to, she could go upstairs, make a cup of tea and take it out onto the back deck and drink it. But any farther than that, her ankle bracelet goes off.

  There is no ankle bracelet. But that’s what it feels like. If she took off down the street, she suspects someone would come after her, probably her father. Not to catch her, exactly, just to keep her in sight. Upstairs kitchen, back deck, this basement apartment are all she’s seen since she got out of rehab, except when her dad drives her to NA meetings. And waits outside.

  The apartment is nicely appointed, no complaints there; well equipped, thoughtfully organized, bright for a basement, tidy. The opposite of her cerebellum, which is cluttered and airless. The apartment may be a little tidy for her taste, but in a pleasant, Ikea sort of way. A little sterile, some would say, too much like a padded cell. But that may be exactly what she needs. A person can have too much freedom. When she considers the matter, the only freedom available to her now is inside her own head. Which Sandra says she should stay out of.

  But actually, even the back deck is out. Too cold, too wet. All she can see through her window is grey sky, the bare tops of trees. It’s Toronto out there. Her father’s deck chairs are still folded in the garage. There’s the sunroom. She could sit in there, but it’s not a sunroom when there’s no sun, and besides, that’s probably where her father is, drinking his cold tea and looking at his watch, wondering if enough time has passed that he can come back downstairs and do his little excuse-me taps on the door again. Tap-tap-tap.

  Oh, Dad. Poor Dad. These past two months have been hard on him. He likely thinks it’s payback for having left when she was so young. And he’s right—it is. She knows she’s spooked the shit out of him. He doesn’t know which end is up. She feels the fear in him every time he comes downstairs. He tries to be firm with her, but he’s not good at firm. He was never good at it. Maybe he thinks being firm now will solve everything. So he’s firm. Not as firm as Elinor. But plaintively firm, saying things like, Maybe you should do as Sandra suggests, what do you think? Sandra tells me not to think. Ah.

  Sandra also says that because he’s a man, he doesn’t know the difference between being firm and being angry. Like with the door-knocking thing. He thinks just opening the door and coming in would be an aggressive act, and so he avoids it. When actually she wishes he’d do that instead of hovering outside like a ghost.

  She likes Sandra. She didn’t think she would, because she’s Elinor’s friend, but she does. She trusts her. She doesn’t know how the writing-cure thing works, but she’s willing to give it a try. She doesn’t know how a microwave oven works, either, but it seems to heat things up all right. She knows Sandra won’t share what she writes with her father or Elinor, because if she did she’d be booted out of psychologists’ camp or whatever—Elinor’s a psychologist, too, and she’s always going on about client-therapist confidentiality. But Daphne wouldn’t really mind if Sandra showed what she wrote to her dad or to Elinor, because in a way she’s really writing to them. That’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? Under the guise of talking to her therapist, she’s really talking to the people she’s having these issues with? Isn’t that what all those self-help books say? She sighs and opens her notebook. She should probably get back to writing to Sandra. Or her father. Whichever.

  * * *

  —

  “Look after your mother for me.” What a stupid thing to say to a ten-year-old. His parting words set me an impossible task. If he couldn’t look after my mother, how did he expect me to? He reads books, he knows what happens to heroes when they’re given quests they can’t fulfill. If they can’t get outside help, like from Rumpelstiltskin, or from gods or lions or aliens (scarce sources in White Falls), they crash and burn.

  Mom was perfectly capable of looking after herself, though. The house was paid for, and Dad sent child support every month, which went straight into my own bank account. It wasn’t much, but it made me popular at school. Ours was not a single-mom-on-welfare household. There were plenty of those in White Falls, everyone knew someone who was on EI or workman’s comp. We were never that badly off. Mom’s job with the mayor kept her away a lot, but it paid well and gave her some standing in the community. We got along, in a distant kind of way, the way two people get along when all they have in common is a mutual enemy.

  She wasn’t exactly an empath. She was also a bit right-wing. When her boss ran for Parliament in 2006 and Herr Harper came to White Falls to stump for him, she was so excited I almost offered to send her some of my Xanax. There were rumours about her and the mayor. I didn’t get them when I was little. Someone would say, So, your mom works under the mayor, does she? And I’d say yes, sir, yes, she does, and everyone would crack up. Maybe Dad knew about it and that’s why he left. Or maybe he didn’t give a shit. Or maybe he left because he didn’t give a shit. By the time I figured out what working under the mayor meant, I was into other things and didn’t give a shit either.

  Am I ranting again? Dad used to rant, maybe I got it from him. Like I said, he was usually quiet and withdrawn, but sometimes something would tip him over the edge and he’d storm about the house, waving his arms and roaring like a great ape. We’d never see it coming. One minute he’d be marking papers and the next he’d be throwing something across the room. Mom would tell him to calm down and that would set him off even more. I think being quiet and withdrawn was something he had to work hard at, that inside he was like a big pressure tank with a wonky valve, and leaving us was one of the times when the valve gave way.

  Ha! You asked me to write down my feelings about my dad and all I write about is him leaving, as if that was the defining moment of my life. How fucked up is that? It’s like this is a trauma story rather than a relationship narrative. I know you’ll say there are no sudden breaks in relationships, nothing really essential changes overnight, my father wasn’t my father one day and then not my father the next. But that’s how it felt. My father kisses me goodbye one morning (let’s say he did), and I don’t see or hear from him for months. He started phoning after a while, and I guess coming up for occasional visits. I remember him staying in a motel out on the highway and picking me up and taking me to soccer on Saturdays, or ballet after school, or we’d go to East Side Mario’s for dinner before Mom got off work. And later, when I was twelve, I started taking the bus down to Toronto to visit him on weekends, and at fifteen I spent a month with him and Elinor during summer vacation. In a way, I think he became more conscious of being a father after he left. At least, when we were together I could tell he was thinking about what it meant to be an absentee dad. It’s like, I had this friend once, he was from Botswana, his name was Festus, and he said he never felt so Botswanan as when he came to Canada. He didn’t used to walk down the street in Gaborone thinking, Here I am, a Tswana man, walking down the street. But he thought that all the time in Toronto. I hope it was like that with Dad. Every time he saw a father and child in Toronto, on the street or in a grocery store, anywhere, I hope he thought, That used to be me. Because I did.

  I knew Festus when I was staying with my dad and Elinor for a month, the summer I turned sixteen. In this very basement apartment, in fact, which I hated. I don’t know if you knew Elinor then, maybe not. She was Dad’s former student or
something, and then after she graduated they started living together. I was doing a lot of drugs even then, in White Falls. Well, not a lot, compared to what came later, but Dad and El didn’t know about it, and I didn’t do drugs that summer in Toronto. Okay, some. Festus always had some weed. It was, like, wherever he was, he had to be doing something illegal. Maybe subconsciously he was trying to get himself sent back to Botswana, who knows? And maybe doing a lot of drugs in high school was me trying to get myself deported back to my childhood, but going about it all wrong. It was like Adam hopping around outside the gates of Eden, chopping down trees and yelling, Hey God, let me back into Eden or I’ll trash this whole fucking place. And God’s inside laughing, and he’s like, Go ahead, asshole, they’re your trees.

  Is that what I was doing? Using drugs and alcohol and trashing my life so that Dad would let me back into Eden? Maybe that’s why I didn’t try very hard to hide what I was doing. Mom knew. She might have been distant, but she wasn’t blind. I think Elinor strongly suspected. If she told Dad, he didn’t say anything. If he let on that he knew, he would have had to do something about it, either let me back in or tell me to get lost. He didn’t do either.

  Festus and I used to meet up in High Park when he got off shift. At first I thought he was a musician, he had really thin, delicate hands, but it turned out he worked in St. Joseph’s hospital, in the laundry room. I worried about the things he must have had to handle, but he was a gentle guy. His favourite writer was Tennessee Williams. I was reading all kinds of crazy shit in those days, none of it getting me anywhere. I didn’t know what I thought about anything (still don’t), except that I hated everything (still do). I cared about the environment, which was the one thing I thought was worth saving. In high school, we were all into environmental issues, eating organic this, buying recycled that. I wrote a paper about how, before Europeans came and stole their land, First Nations people had lived so much in harmony with nature that after ten thousand years their environment was as healthy as ever. I especially hated capitalism. I used to call my father a capitalist pig. He’d say, But I teach journalism, how can I be a capitalist pig? And I’d be like: Randolph Hearst? Rupert Murdoch? Conrad Black?

  But then he quit teaching journalism and started selling wine. At a profit. Isn’t that what a capitalist does? Festus lent me Tennessee Williams’s memoir, which I read because I wanted to see what Festus saw in him. Williams wrote about meeting the great Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko had gone to see Williams’s new play the night before, Small Craft Warnings, and when they met the next day he told Williams he didn’t like it, he could do better. Williams was majorly pissed off. They were having lunch, and Williams was paying, and Yevtushenko ordered a bottle of expensive wine, a whole bowl of caviar, the biggest steak in the house, and Williams cracked and called him a fucking capitalist pig. Yevtushenko, the great Soviet poet, a capitalist pig! So what did it mean when I called my father a capitalist pig? Nada. But it felt good.

  * * *

  —

  “Daphne?”

  Her father again. She closes her notebook, looks at her watch: half an hour. She gets up from the dining table and goes into her galley kitchen to put on the kettle.

  “Hey Dad, it’s open.”

  A pause, then he comes in and stands just inside the door. “Feel like taking a tea break?” he says.

  “Sure. I’m just putting the kettle on. Earl Grey or herbal?”

  “Earl Grey, please.” He edges towards the table, where her notebook is. “What are you working on?” He would have lasted about three seconds as a spy.

  “Stuff Sandra gave me to do,” she says. “My memoirs.”

  She finds herself studying her father as she waits for the water to boil. He looks like he’s scowling, but he always looks like he’s scowling, it’s the way his face is made. Even when he drifts off into his private universe, he looks as though something in there is pissing him off. Apparently you cannot control what enters your own private universe. Something uninvited always creeps in. Her father is the kind of guy who would rather look back at the blasted past than ahead to the doomed future. She’s the opposite. For her, when the bottle is empty, she doesn’t take it back for the deposit, she just buys a new bottle.

  When her father left, he wasn’t running to something, he was running from something. She guesses he didn’t ask, Where am I going? but rather, What have I done? Did he drive to Toronto in a kind of panic, that scowl etching deeper into his face the farther he got from her?

  Getting her off drugs has been hard on both of them, but has it not also been kind of a victory, too? Something they should be celebrating? Instead, her dad comes downstairs looking as though her getting clean was the beginning of a long and not very pleasant journey he can’t bring himself to contemplate.

  He’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater, and slippers with toes that have separated from their rubber soles. He flaps when he shuffles away from the table. It’s her opinion that men over a certain age—say, fifty—should not wear jeans of any kind. His teacup has a Union Jack on it and the words “Drink Tea and Carry On.” She loves him, of course she does, and his frightened look weighs on her heart. Yes, she does have a heart. How old is he? She has to think for a minute. He’s fifty-one. Well, well, either those jeans go or she does.

  “Sandra and Elinor say I shouldn’t be coming down and bothering you.”

  “You’re not bothering me, Dad. I feel like I’m done writing for now anyway.”

  “I think they mean I might overstimulate you.”

  “No chance of that.”

  That didn’t come out right. She smiles, but she can see he thinks she meant that there’s no chance of bland, old Dad overstimulating her. She actually meant it in a welcoming way. But never mind. He doesn’t pursue it, either, because pursuit might overstimulate her.

  “When I finish this writing thing, Sandra says I could be ready for group sessions.”

  “Group is a big step. It’s only been a month.”

  “I do group at NA.”

  “I think that’s different. But if Sandra thinks it’s okay.”

  “I’ve never been good at sharing.”

  “Well, you’ve changed in a lot of ways, Daphne.”

  “Oh? In what ways?”

  “Don’t you feel you have?”

  “I do, but I’m curious to know how you think I’ve changed.”

  “Well,” he says, cautiously, “you’ve become more the person I always knew was in there. More yourself. Don’t roll your eyes, I know it’s a cliché. But I’m proud of you, you have a lot of guts.” He pauses while she pours the tea, Earl Grey for him, Bora Bora for her. “You used to hate being down here in the basement, remember that?” Of course she does; it was only eight months ago.

  “That’s why you stopped coming here, right?” he asks.

  Wow. Is that what he thinks? Is that the depth of his insight into why she stopped speaking to him? She disowned him because she didn’t like his decor?

  “Maybe the basement was part of it,” she says, since they’re both being conciliatory. “I was just telling Sandra that in Vancouver I was surrounded by mountains, open spaces, blue skies, ocean, huge trees. And here, all I can see through these little escape-proof windows is grey sky. Even when I’m outside, the ground is all concrete and the horizon is all skyscrapers.”

  “The environment is important to you, is it?”

  “Dad, you know it is. The environment is everything. It’s more than everything. It’s what’s left when everything is gone.”

  “But is everything gone?”

  “People used to say that about God, didn’t they? That God was what was left when everything else was gone. And then God left.”

  “Did he?” he asks.

  “What, you think he just changed? Do you think you’ve changed?”

  He looks startled. “How d
o you mean?”

  “Well, you say I’ve changed. Have you?”

  “Of course I have…Things change a person, you know. I’ve stopped drinking, for one thing. Cold turkey.”

  She shivers. The conversation is drifting into dangerous waters. Tests, traps, admissions. Her father has never admitted he’s an addict. Addicts, he says, don’t quit. (What was she, then?) She decides not to become overstimulated. She knew a man in Vancouver who hadn’t had a drink in twenty-five years. He never said he quit drinking, he just said he hadn’t had a drink in twenty-five years. An important distinction her father doesn’t seem to get. She can’t believe how tenaciously he holds on to that line, given her situation. He was a heavy drinker, he says, he needed to quit. But he was not an alcoholic. He never drank too much, he says, just more than was good for him. He started putting on weight, his blood pressure went a bit high, his cholesterol was up a notch, Elinor said he was getting forgetful. Nothing serious. She tells him addicts always say they aren’t addicts. He says there are two kinds of people who say they aren’t addicts: addicts and people who aren’t addicts.

  Basically, what he’s saying without saying it is that he’s the dad and she’s the kid, and he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, which is why she’s here. Talking to him has always been like chasing a chicken around a barn. A lot of squawking and flying feathers, and once in a while you find an egg, but you never quite catch the chicken. Buried just beneath their conversation lately is the fact that she’s just completed two months of rehab and therapy for drug and alcohol addiction. She does know what addiction is. But that is never mentioned because (a) elephants in rooms rarely are, and (b) she’s not supposed to get overstimulated about there being an elephant in the room. Maybe it’s because Sandra says this writing-cure thing doesn’t work if you’re not one hundred percent honest that she’s pursuing the topic now. A person can do a satisfying amount of damage in the name of honesty.