“How do you know? You don’t know that.” Tears rimmed his eyes. “Oh, come on now. Don’t be like your mother.”
At my mother’s house, I wasn’t allowed to invite anyone. At my father’s house, he wanted everyone to come. I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth: You’re too strange.
His pleas—phone receiver extended, me vrooming olive oil and vinegar and mustard in the blender or turning the pieces of steak in the iron skillet—were inevitably uttered over the porn movie playing on the television/VCR that sat on our dining room table. A pulsing mmm mmm mm in the background as the couples did what they did to the dull tuneless music.
How could he possibly ask me to ask someone over?
But he did. Every night.
Strangers showed up, ringing the bell or just walking in. Men he’d met at the Moose or the VFW, women from the Amber Keg and the Starlight Lounge. Sometimes, with a house full of drunken strangers, I slipped out the back door, returning late at night, when I was certain he and his guests had passed out.
Other nights, the two of us sat alone at the table. I silenced the television, ejected the porn cassette, placed it on the stack on the floor.
He read the paper. Or we played cards or chess. His nails always looked better than mine. He’d grab my hands as I cleared the plates.
“You will never marry,” he’d say, suddenly tearful. “You’ll never leave me. Because you’ll never meet a man like your ole daddy.”
I cringed at the words, which seemed both a blessing and curse.
“Let’s go jookin’,” he’d say after dinner, once a month or so. “What do you say?” His face marbled with hope and gin.
And so instead of going to a friend’s house on the weekends (I had none), or going out with a boyfriend, as my classmates did, I went to the bars with my father—my father wearing makeup and a bra and panty hose under his polo and jeans. I was the designated driver, happy enough to be out of the house, happy to drive down seedy Orange Avenue to the Amber Keg, to go inside that dark, cool, musty room and sit at the bar writing in my notebook while he talked and talked to everyone there. Hours later, I steered him to the Oldsmobile, always one of the last cars in the lot. Pressed him into the passenger seat. Drove home. I felt old, odd, confident, superior, doomed, and desolate.
As often as not after dinner, he passed out on the sofa, which was my bed. I turned the television to face the other end of the dining room table, made a tiny sofa-ette out of two dining room chairs, and clicked through the channels for a Clint Eastwood movie.
Other nights, a woman showed up—rarely one I’d seen before. The women were always tall, big-breasted, slim-hipped, wearing lots of makeup, shiny party clothes, and white or silver or black patent high-heel sandals. They draped themselves on my father, who wore what he wore, and was whatever he was, who took them out into the night.
Sometimes in the morning, leaving for school, I’d come down the hallway and if his bedroom door was open, I’d see a woman in his bed.
I could not imagine.
Was this life better than the one I’d had at my mother’s house? Hard to say. I constantly regretted my decision to live with him. But when my mother called on weekends to check on me, because she asked lightly how we were doing, I answered lightly, “He’s a handful!”
Her edged pause. “Are you safe?”
Long silence. I didn’t know if I was safe or not. I’m not sure I knew what safety was. I knew my mother meant something different than most people when she talked about safety. I knew she wanted me to say yes. I was surprised my mother wasn’t trying to get me back. And I didn’t want to go back. Always, I felt as if I were playing along when I assured her that yes, yes, I was safe.
When I spoke to my mother on the telephone, I stared out the window over the kitchen sink, toward a palm tree, broken-down patio furniture, and perfect blue silk sky. I didn’t see the piles of porn magazines, my father’s bras on the floor with a heap of laundry, the empty gin bottles sitting on the counter by the sink. I saw a fridge filled with food that was edible, open windows with light streaming in, a little world that was my little world—a journal, a pen, my gold sofa, my neatly folded sheets, my nest.
When it was time for me to go to college, Fred refused to disclose any of his finances so that I could apply for financial aid. He wanted me to stay with him, get a job as a secretary. If you leave, you’re on your own. So I was on my own. I rode a Trailways bus to the university five hours north, used babysitting savings, worked three jobs.
On breaks, when the school closed, I arranged for special permission to stay in the dorm. I was one of only a few people there. A smattering of students from China and the Middle East walked across the empty campus. We never spoke.
When I graduated, my friends married or moved in with their lovers but I did not. Instead, I worked on a PhD and the much more difficult tasks of how to be less anxious around a man and how to relax inside someone’s house, how to love and be loved. I spoke with my father on the phone infrequently. I sensed that I needed to lay down all new wiring in my body and mind so I could choose whom to let in, and whom to keep at bay. I sensed this renovation had to occur at the cellular level and would take many years. Didn’t we get all new cells every seven years?
One Friday afternoon, when I was a first-year doctoral student, Fred called out of the blue. He’d be at my house for dinner Saturday, a quick stopover on his way to Four Corners, Arizona, a place he’d always wanted to see.
I was thrilled and nervous. I was delighted to tell my friends he was coming, but of course did not invite them. I scrambled to assemble his favorite from The Joy of Cooking: chicken cordon bleu. I bought a bottle of Sancerre, chilled it, and made a salad using tomatoes from my little city lot garden. I set the table on the porch. Cloth napkins. Candles.
He never showed.
I threw the dinner in the trash.
When I finally tracked him down by telephone later that week, he had no memory of any of it.
Wrapped tightly inside my disappointment and despair about his not showing up, there was a tiny nut of relief. It was so hard to be around him. My father was unreliable, not just in terms of behavior, but in terms of identity. I suspected my father was not knowable, not even to himself. Would he even know if I loved him or not?
And always I wondered, What is Fred? Gay? Bi? A transvestite? Did he want to be a woman? What was he?
In the library, I slipped into the dimly lit stacks on the second floor, far in the rear of the building, where the psychology texts were located. I’d read, secretly, flooded with shame at the photos of diseased genitals and countless descriptions of sexual deviation. Among the sex with corpses and unspeakable unspeakables, I quietly searched for any book, an article, a paragraph—something that would explain to me what my father was, what he was not, and why. I never found anything that fit him, which underscored the fact that I’d come from unclassifiable, impossible oddness, weirdness so profound that if anyone knew, I’d be ruled out as someone you might want to love.
Did he want to be perceived as a member of the opposite sex? I thought (feared) so when I was young but I don’t think so now. I don’t know how my father felt about his genitals, or his gender; now I doubt he had the kind of cognitive organization that allows for such thinking. Fred operated in a different realm: how others perceived him wasn’t on the table, much less in the dressing room.
Over the years, I talked to several therapists about my father. One urged me to see the humor in men in dresses and suggested I watch Tootsie and Some Like It Hot. No thanks. I’d seen the covers on the videotapes at the rental store: men in dresses dressed for a caper with a purpose. I couldn’t imagine enjoying those films; I was a girl with a dad who was not amusing and people weren’t watching a movie when they watched my dad—it was our lives, no joke.
The woman-dressed men in the movies made sense for the story. My dad did not make sense. Men in women’s clothes didn’t bother me at all in movies or in life. Typicall
y, they wore clothes well; makeup, carefully applied, made them beautiful. They were clearly home in a way my father never was. But coarse hetero men in ill-fitting, frumpy dresses were unbearable to me.
Another therapist told me, “Women can wear men’s clothes—suits, ties, pants—and we see nothing wrong with that kind of cross-dressing. Widen your perspective.”
I could not widen my perspective. My perspective had been long since overdilated.
Besides, my father didn’t really cross-dress. He didn’t cross over, he crossed out. He never seemed comfortable or happy in his skin. He always seemed about to leap out of it.
I knew from my stealth reading that most cross-dressers were straight and married and that most cross-dressed for erotic pleasure, some for self-soothing. I’m not sure that my dad loved women’s clothes. Maybe. Maybe he loved what binds a woman. Maybe he loved our softness, our tears, our allowed-for, count-on-it, sanctioned tenderness, our very pliable weakness, our ability to melt and flutter and still be loved. Maybe my dad wasn’t anything trans- or cross-. Maybe Fred’s cross-dressing was what some psychologists call an “erotic target error”: he assigned meaning to gender that was so far from reality, it’s incomprehensible to us.
For example, now, across the street from my house, there’s a family who hangs a white Christmas wreath on their door—in March and April. And then in June, the white wreath is exchanged for a green Christmas wreath, complete with balls and bells. Christmas decorations don’t mean to this family what they mean to most of the rest of us.
Maybe parts of my father’s sexuality and meaning-making map were scrambled in his early cognitive development. Maybe some part of his personality remained a tiny child for whom sex isn’t sex; it’s something else altogether, like a wreath in July. In this scenario, sexuality is assigned meaning that has no words, but in adult life exhibits powerful energy. Strange urgent sexuality and desire pulse and spin constantly, but never line up in actions or relationships in ways we would normally expect.
Put another way, maybe my father was haywire.
When he had colon cancer the first time, I was in my late twenties and I flew home to Orlando to help him. In the hospital bed the morning of the operation, he dozed as a nurse came in to prep him.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s already been shaved.” She was clearly confused—her chart showed he was to be shaved for the surgery. She had the little kit at the ready.
I looked up at her, anxiously. His nails were painted. Did she see?
“Did he just have another surgery? I didn’t see that in the chart.” She was touching my father’s chest, which was covered with black stubble.
I looked down at the floor. I wanted to say, Yes, another surgery, but I didn’t want to be caught in a lie. What could I say that would make sense?
She was looking at his legs now. The hair was starting to grow out, black metal filings that covered his pale skin. She looked almost angry with confusion. I realized I’d been editing out the parts of my father that didn’t make sense for so long, I no longer saw him how others saw him and perhaps could not.
During the colon cancer treatments, my fiancé offered to come to Orlando to help me with my father. I couldn’t imagine the two men in the same world much less the same room.
I had to be with my father on my own.
The fiancé was long distance and then just distance. Alone felt safest, the best I could do. By my midthirties, I still hadn’t married. I dreamed of a family, children, but it didn’t seem possible to pull it off.
PhD in hand, I landed a good job at a small private college in a postcard-perfect town in Michigan, some thousand miles from home. In spring in this village, the streets were ritually washed with buckets of sudsy water by women with brooms. Most people went to church. In the hyperconformity, I thrived. On the surface, no one was weird. Because they had no fluency in weirdness, they would never detect my history. If it was unknowable to them, it didn’t exist. Here, only here, I could pass. I had friends. I wrote books. I was a respected teacher. At last, I had a steady boyfriend who lived in the same town I did, a lifelong bachelor who’d had a difficult time growing up in a wealthy family. I felt we were a good match, both so different from regular citizens—his extreme wealth had isolated him as poverty of normal experience had isolated me.
I called my parents on holidays. Over the past two decades, they’d somehow become friends. My mother helped my father, who’d survived a massive cerebral hemorrhage, kept him company on Sunday afternoons. He was wheelchair-bound, paralyzed on his right side. She seemed to love bringing him groceries, arranging aspects of home health care on his behalf.
Sometimes I spoke to the two of them together.
When you coming home? Come on home.
Honey, we’d so love to see you. Can you come down?
Months and months passed between phone calls. I wanted to see them, badly, before it was too late, and yet I couldn’t bear to go back to those rooms, those shadows, that story.
One late afternoon I was reading students’ stories at my kitchen table when the phone rang.
“It’s your aunt Ruthie,” a woman said out of the blue. It took me a moment to figure out who she was. My father’s sister. We hadn’t talked in—years? She sounded angry when she said, “I’m bringing your dad by to see you.”
I told her this was not a good time. I was swamped with schoolwork. And summer was sadly already booked—teaching, Ireland. Maybe September?
“We’re in Indiana,” she said hoarsely. “ ’Bout two hours away. My God. How long has he been this bad? Did you know he drinks in the morning?”
My father was with her? Two hours away?
She’d driven to Florida and gathered up my dad. Our reunion was her mission. I was just hearing about all this now.
I felt my head fill with something like wet smoke. I couldn’t have my father hurtling into my pretty little bungalow, my carefully wrought life, these small, tidy rooms, the orderly village of Holland, Michigan, populated by conservative, religious Dutch Reformers.
I asked my aunt if they could postpone. Maybe I could come to see them . . . later? As I spoke, something happened behind my forehead. An apocalyptic headache was brewing, the likes of which I’d never experienced before.
My aunt grew more insistent. She was only staying one night, dropping my father off at my house for the week, as she was heading north.
I suggested a motel.
A motel was out of the question. They were planning to stay with me, she said. And Fred would be with me until she got back from her trip up north.
“I’m not set up for company,” I told my aunt firmly if shakily. I tried to imagine my father, his extravagantly permed long golden hair and makeup, careening past the tidy tulip beds, accosting my teetotaling neighbors with questions. What the hell with all these churches? Where are the bars? The good-looking women?
My aunt said they were on their way and she hung up the phone. I wanted to slip out the back door, as I had as a teenager, and run.
And yet, he was my father, whose eyes visibly brightened when I entered the room.
Hey baby, where you been? I’ve been wanting to talk to you about many things.
No one else’s eyes did that for me.
No one else wanted to talk to me, urgently.
After Ruthie said goodbye, a time bomb started ticking. I took three aspirin, but the monstrous headache only intensified. It felt as if my skull was going to divide into two pieces, then shatter. I drove downtown in sunglasses and ordered a double espresso from the coffee shop.
My aunt and my father were in the gas station parking lot when I pulled up—I’d insisted on meeting them out by the highway. She stood by the hood of the car, arms crossed over her chest, and he was in his wheelchair, smoking by the trunk. The doors to my aunt’s station wagon were open, and the two of them seemed flung out of wreckage. It had been a terrible drive. They both looked miserable.
My father cried as he came toward me
in his wheelchair with his arms open. We hugged. I touched his soft face. He smelled like home: cigarette smoke and sour, lemony soap and perfume. His hair was pulled back in a long white ponytail. He wore stained khakis, socks, beaten-down work shoes. His fingernails were unpainted. No traces of makeup. Age and poverty and the stroke had all taken their toll.
“He’s yours,” Ruthie said, looking at me and simultaneously flicking my father on the shoulder.
Fred wanted to hug more. I pressed one hand on his chest, holding him down in his chair.
“He’s driving me crazy,” my aunt said loudly. “Out of my effing mind.”
“What the hell you talking about!” He turned in a half circle, jerked back toward his sister. “You’re not listening. You hear but you aren’t listening!” my father shouted at her.
My aunt said I had to keep my dad with me for a few days while she went on her vacation.
I explained that I didn’t have a guest room and my house couldn’t accommodate a wheelchair. There were steps—five or six—just to enter, narrow stairs inside.
She seemed furious. My father couldn’t be left alone, she said. He needed care. I needed to care more. Plans for his future needed to be made: Where was I?
Why did you bring him from Florida to Michigan? I wondered silently.
Okay, she said, at last, a motel, but that was very expensive. And she desperately needed a break from my dad. She wanted me to stay in the motel with him so she could get on with her trip.
He looked so hurt when she said this.
Why are you here? Why did you bring him here? I couldn’t speak these words. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t going to stay in a motel room with my father but I didn’t want to say this in front of him. My headache made me wonder if I should go to the ER. It felt as if something were about to burst. I went home.
They shared a room at the Days Inn. The next morning, I came by and helped my father into my car. He grabbed my thigh, hard, and then from his pants pocket pulled out two vials of gin. “Hit?” he said.
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