In March, when I return to Minnesota, my father’s face has yellowed. His cheeks are sunken, pulling his lips back to expose his teeth. His eyes are dim, the skin across them gluey. Sores and scabs cover his feet and hands. His ears brown in decay. Whoever he once was seems lost to sulphuric clouds of a futuristic landscape inhabited by skeletal creatures in a place unable to sustain skin, organs, blood, life. Still, when he sees me, for this moment, now, the expression on his face seems to rise from his polluted landscape and glow with joy. This lasts only a moment. I want to hold it—and can, and do—in my mind.
This visit he can barely speak, and I can barely understand him. He sleeps more. But every time he opens his eyes I tell him I love him. He nods his head and mouths, “I love you, too.” I want more. I say these words insistently, as if now, even at this late moment, he can be redeemed, as if something can be said or done, if not to erase the past, then to diminish it. If he would ask forgiveness. If he would tell me he ’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. If he would even just acknowledge it. But the past, in an inversion of time, seems to have fled to that futuristic landscape choked with sulphuric clouds. Still, like a stubborn, willful, yet loving child, I sit by him in his room, waiting for some acknowledgment before he dies.
Later, I leave his room and go to sit with my mother in hers. This trip I seem to journey back and forth between my father’s room on the third floor and my mother’s room on the fourth, as if I hope to discover a new answer to the mystery at the end of this incomprehensible voyage. Or perhaps I can entreat new spirits to invade my parents’ bodies, quickly, before they die. To help me, I want to light candles, inhale incense, perform a secret ceremony. Now I gaze into my mother’s eyes as I’d gazed into my father’s, as if searching for someone new, searching for clues. Except in their eyes I see no new spirits, no new clues. And still I do not see eyes that reflect their daughter.
If only I could hear, once again, the mother and daughter who spoke on the phone that night, now, before she dies. If only my mother and I could discover a way to say good-bye to each other, if not with truth, then at least with grace. We cannot. For ceaselessly, during recent phone calls, she has demanded to know whether I would, if I could, provide her with enough pills to kill herself, even though she knows legally I can’t. “This would be an act of love,” she says, her voice brittle as glass, announcing Kiki would do it for her. What she wants to know is: Do I love her as much as Kiki loves her, love her enough to kill her? What I want to ask her, what I want to know, is whether this is an inverted test of her daughters’ love or whether her desire is darker, an ancient ritual she needs performed. But how can she not know that even if I magically conjured the sleeping pills she desires, there would never be enough tablets, potions, or incantations to truly ease her journey?
“Can I bring you a tray, Mom?” I ask her, since it’s almost time for dinner.
“This’s plenty.” In a small plastic baggie my mother keeps a meager supply of nuts—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, with a thin hand she reaches into the bag for an almond, then slides it slowly, lovingly, into her mouth as if believing this one nut will summon starvation rather than prolong life.
“How about juice?”
“No. Nothing.”
I can understand a desire to die because she’s in pain. What I don’t understand is her desire to die coldly, to die without comfort, die in isolation. Now, I wonder, I wonder if it’s possible, I wonder if she decided to die that moment I told her, when I was in the hospital, that I’d been sexually molested. At that time I thought she ’d barely heard what I said. She’d barely responded to what I’d said. But maybe, overwhelmingly terrified to acknowledge her fear behind the truth of our family, this is her response: Unable to protect her daughters, she thinks she deserves to die. I think of Macon, that woman who’d tried to kill herself, because she, too, was scared to see and to hear her daughter. Couldn’t Macon have found another way? Can’t my mother, can’t we, can’t all of us, find another way, discover something better, something softer, than dying alone in small rooms of fury and shame? Oh, Mother, how can you not know that a simple apology would do?
“Maybe I could just stay with you while you eat.” I nod toward her nuts.
“I’m fine.” Slowly my mother crunches her one thin almond. “Go eat with your father. You know how happy he always is to see you.”
As I obediently stand to retrace my steps back downstairs to my father, I pause by the door and glance back. Mother, a simple desire for you to want to eat with me, for you to always be happy to see me, would be enough, would do.
I eat dinner with my father in order to feed him. He needs help eating. With the swelling in his hands he can’t manage silverware. I cut his food and hold it to his mouth, small bite after slow bite. We sit with the other patients, all in various stages of sanity and life. Music from the 1940s tries to calm the inhuman sounds of dementia. Yet I am tense, as if tenseness can protect me from the sounds of dying, protect me from where all of us are eventually going. When I call my husband, he says when we baby boomers hit the nursing homes they’ll play rock music and give us tie-dyed bibs to catch our drool. I imagine tapping a gnarled finger to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
So, yes, I feed my father. I hold apple juice and coffee to his lips. I cut his banana and his meat. Like a recalcitrant child, he won’t eat his vegetables. His eye is on the ice cream, and he wants to eat it first, he wants to eat it now, before his dinner. Why not? Since I eat with him, I eat my ice cream first, too. We smile at each other, two naughty children—always—breaking the rules.
Late at night, unable to sleep, I call Randy’s office, only needing to hear his answering machine and leave a message. I tell Randy about feeding my father. In my mind I hear him answer: You ’ve always fed your father. I would nod my head, agreeing. Would you like to stop? he would ask. Yes, I want to stop. Being here, feeding my father, I feel as if I’ve never stopped. You can stop feeding him, Randy, I imagine, would say. He can’t hurt you any longer if you stop.
But I’m scared to stop feeding him. I feed him because I love him, because I can’t stop loving him. I feed him because I can’t stop wanting him to love me. I feed him because he needs it so badly, feed him because he’s never been nourished. I feed him and feed him—just one more time, I tell myself. I’ll feed him one more time and this time, this will be the time, when everything will turn out different, this will be the time I’ll have the family I always wanted.
I hug my mother good-bye, hug her, I know, for the last time. The skin on her shoulders is a loose fit for her frail bones, yes, rejecting her body as quickly as possible. Yet I hold her shoulders tight, as if I can hold her together, as if I can insist she feel me, feel the warmth of her daughter now, before she dies. “Mom.” Don’t leave yet. I’m not ready. Perhaps if I remind her of that late-night phone conversation—perhaps if she hears and remembers her daughter’s voice, she’ll want to live. “Mom,” I whisper. “Wait, remember—”
“You have such a kind husband,” she says. “And your therapist—”
“Yes, I know, I’m very lucky.”
“After we’re gone you’ll have enough money. You won’t need to worry.”
“Yes, I know, thank you. But, Mom —”
She sighs and shrugs her shoulders. No, I can’t remind her of that phone call. I’m scared to remind her, scared she won’t remember. Slowly I release her shoulders, my mother’s shoulders, my mother, the antithesis of my father, my father who needs too much, while my mother needs too little, rejecting nourishment and care, even now as she’s dying. Still she’s terrified to allow her family to warm her, much more terrified of this than of dying. Slowly, I back out of the room. She seems to be dissolving. White hair. White skin. White sheets. Her blue eyes are her only color. They aren’t bright or sparkling but are deeper, bluer than usual, as if all that she is has coalesced to these blue eyes. I pause in the doorway, gently letting my own eyes say good-bye, letting my eyes sa
y, wanting to say … It is too late. There is no more time. But, Mom —all I ever wanted was you.
Two weeks later, on Friday, April 3, 1992, the phone call comes: My mother is dead. The nurse who calls says that after my mother died the rabbi brought my father into my mother’s room to say good-bye. “Do you think he understood?” I ask. “It’s difficult to know, but probably,” she says. I imagine the scene the nurse describes. My father is hunched in his wheelchair. He takes his wife’s hand and holds it, this last time. His wife. After all these years, this is virtually the first time he’s seen her in months. He will stroke the papery skin on her hand, the raised vein that travels between her knuckles. What will his heart want to tell her that’s too late for his voice to say? But Daddy, you always told me she never heard anyway. The nurse says he motioned for her, the nurse, to bend down, and she imagined he’d wanted to tell her something. He kissed her cheek instead. He probably thought I was you, she says to me, and I agree. For weeks I believe this. And maybe it’s true. But I think of the nurses he kissed in the hospital, and I believe it could have been anyone.
My husband and I take the next plane to Rochester. I’m coming, Father, for you. Since he knows my mother is dead, I want him to know there will still be someone to care for him. I’m coming, Father, for you. He must know this; he must feel the plane drawing closer and closer. I literally can’t stand the thought he’ll believe he’s alone. Right now nothing that happened matters. I have to be with him, that’s all.
By the time we reach my father’s room he’s sleeping. My husband and I stand by his bed gazing down at him. He’s curled like a sick, feverish child, and I bend to touch his forehead. He is small, helpless, innocent. He is vulnerable. Unprotected. Anyone could hurt him. But who would ever be able to hurt someone so small, so faint, so diminished?
When I whisper good-night my father’s jaw moves as if he’s chewing. “An involuntary reflex,” my husband whispers, not wanting to wake him. All the months, years, since I told my husband what my father did to me, he’s hated him, has been capable of anger toward my father that I haven’t yet been able to reach. But right now even he, watching my father, seems to find it difficult to sustain it.
As we turn off the lamp, my father’s jaw is still chewing.
The next day Mack, Kiki, her daughter Sarah (Todd, my nephew, has not flown up here), and I sit in the lounge making arrangements for the memorial service. Sarah sits beside me on the couch, leaning her head against my shoulder. I slip an arm around her. Still young, in her early twenties, she seems exhausted with the family crisis, maybe scared of this death, scared of her grandfather’s dementia. Just scared. She has come to me for reassurance, for comfort. I want to give it. Always I want her to know how much I love her. And for a moment I think about that winter night Todd was born in Boston, and how I felt, for the first time in my life, what I can only call love, an ancient love, a need to protect. I felt the same later when Sarah was born, another small treasure, yes, but as babies and children helpless, too, I noticed, when I baby-sat for Todd and Sarah when they were little.
Sarah, now sitting close beside me for comfort, is relaxed. And I realize: She is not scared of me. We talk frequently on the phone. Whenever possible I visit, or she, whenever possible, visits me. She is not scared of me. She knows she is safe with me, has always been safe, from the moment she was born. I glance at her to check this reality. She smiles at me. I know, I’m sure, she’s not scared of me. And suddenly these six words reveal to me a lifetime of lies—my parents’ lies.
But truth, too. I see a startling truth: That just because you are molested as a child does not mean you must grow up to be a molester. You do not have to pass it on. I have not passed it on. For what I truly discovered that moment I first saw Todd—discovering, only in a glimpse, at that moment but am discovering more truly now—is that the definition my father had taught me for love, of how to love a child, is wrong. But more than wrong. Simply, yet profoundly, his definition has always been absent in me.
And a deeper truth: My father and my mother each had a choice, could have chosen a different definition of love. They could have realized they didn’t know how to love their children healthy, love them well. They could have understood their impulse and sought help. Until they recovered, they could have sent Kiki and me to live with my aunt and uncle. They chose to stay together. They were the parents, the adults, they chose to be. We all are the parents, the adults, we choose to be.
I think of last night, of my father’s jaw, chewing. Was he chewing in order to swallow? Swallow his grief? Now as he’s dying is he grieving, too late, the death of a daughter? Is he grieving the real death of his wife? His wife, my mother. Who was she to him?
He never left her; she never left him. So I must know they wanted to remain married all these years, almost sixty. Daddy, for me? Did he stay with her in order to stay with me? Or did he stay with her because she was his wife? She was his wife, the one to whom he wrote beautiful anniversary letters. Who was I, then? Certainly I wasn’t his daughter; certainly I wasn’t his wife. A mistress? A lover? A slut? Yes, my mother always called me that. She received the tribute, the money, the title of wife while she allowed me to perform unspeakable acts with her husband, acts she didn’t want to perform herself. Her love: I was a present to her husband. His: how gratefully he accepted me. They chose to be dangerous parents. It is a choice: to choose to protect children or not. To choose a different kind of love or not. Right now I’m angry she’s dead, angry because right now I want to kill her.
By the time I go to bed that night, I know my mother’s body has been cremated. What is the chill in the black brick oven where her naked body sleeps? It is the steel pallet she’s placed on. It is the whoosh of night roiling down the chimney. As the harsh lick of flames devours her body, it is the inner core of her bones cooling the oven. Each strand of hair is ignited, her head a bristle of fire surrounding her face. Her face will be the last to perish. Her toes and fingers curl in heat, her breasts wither. Through the transparent skin on her neck, her throat glows like the glass chimney of a hurricane lantern. I see inside. I see the gaseous venom of her words spew into her mouth like ash. With the force of the sharp syllable “slut,” her jaw cracks open and flame explodes, igniting her tongue and her teeth. They burn to soot. Soot dots the corners of her lips. Her eyes, still, are peaceful: She escaped the rage of my father; she desired his rage for me. And she is peaceful now becausethis—in this black brick oven—is where she has always lived and where she has always wanted to be. Now, no longer can anyone touch her. She dies before I reach my wrath; she dies before I can remind her I’m her daughter.
The next day we receive the ash and bone of my mother. She is inside an 8 X 6-inch black box, 5 inches high. The box is made of heavy plastic and was constructed in Orlando, Florida. The box is too big for her and when I turn it the ash slides from side to side. I hear her sliding. Feel the weight shifting. Attached to the box is a Certificate of Cremation by the Southern Minnesota Crematory, performed by Ron Hodge. A stranger. She would like this, the way she loved to display her body to doctors. Surely her darkest fantasy was to be placed naked by a stranger inside a black brick oven. By a man. By no one she would ever have to know, by no one who would ever know her.
My father remained married to his wife to be with us all: his three precious little girls. By staying with us, he had all three of us dying for his love and affection. Even though he had none, ever, to give us back.
Father, I want to ask you: What do you remember? I want to ask you: What do you know? How did you first decide to open the door to enter my bedroom? What was your desultory, internal passage through time and space that brought you to my body, brought you to my bed? I want to ask if you remember what we did behind all the bedroom walls. Where no one could see. When no one was watching. No one saw the curtains barely shudder as you opened the door. Softly. So no one could hear. Or was no one listening? Because no one would want to hear this, ever. Except I heard. T
o me, your footsteps echoed as if you walked deserted corridors, always coming toward me. The air around you was fierce and tense. It was as thick as heat and unbreathable, combustible, urgent. Because I heard, I remember. And because I remember terror, Father, I remember you.
Father, what do you remember?
What I remember is that we never spoke. That I never uttered a sigh. I—your silent accomplice to unforgivable crimes. Your secret partner in unspeakable sins.
Did you love me, hate me, or think you merely owned me? My body/your possession. What did my skin say to you? Did my skin shudder like the curtains, or was it still, shocked to silence?
You are the core of a red sun. I stand encased in a sheet of burning glass until the sun shatters it. In silence. The pieces fall. You shattered me. You made me fall.
It happened at night.
Secrets happen at night.
I waited for you to come at night. You still come at night. Except now you come in dreams of blood.
It was only in the morning, every morning, we cleaned up the evidence, Father, all that blood. Every morning you and I were grimly clean. And still silent.
I’m asking you, Father, what do you remember? If you say nothing, I will tell you. If you say nothing, I will remind you that you, Father, were the one to hurt someone who was faint, who was diminished, who was small.
Your nightdaughter
Six days later my father dies. There will be no memorial service for him. Neither my sister nor I return to Minnesota. He, too, is cremated. His ashes, like my mother’s, are kept by my sister.
My father couldn’t live without his wife for even a week. People think they died together because they loved each other so much. They died together because they loved to hate each other so much, because they didn’t know how to live without it. They were addicted to hate, addicted to destruction. The destruction of their lives’ work, their life together, has been completed.
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Page 23