I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  I’m stunned. For a minute I slip into that defended state where it seems like it all happened to someone else. Growing up, I lived in that space all the time. Completely detached from everything. I would tell my life story as if I were talking about a character on All My Children. But over the years, I have reconnected the wires—many of them, anyhow—and now have an ability to experience my life from the inside outward.

  Still, I cannot fathom how my own mother’s mother could dispose of her own flesh and blood. Cute flesh and blood! I can see how much more comforting it has been to imagine my crazy mother being unable to take care of me than my super-rational grandmother making a calculated decision to just…give me away. It’s the difference between manslaughter and premeditated murder. One’s fundamentally human. The other is fundamentally not.

  I also can’t help but wonder exactly how Helen carried out her plan. Did she simply get out the phone book, jot down an address, drive there, put some money in a meter outside a sterile-looking building downtown, and walk in with a three-year-old girl, then walk out without one? Or did she bring me home from the airport and, after deliberating for a while, call social services, then wait an hour and forty minutes for some idealistic codependent (who didn’t know what to major in at the University of Minnesota and picked social work out of a hat) to knock on the front door, talk briefly with her, then take me by the hand, put me in the backseat of a car, and drive off with me?

  Did I know what was happening? Did she give me a kiss? Did I wave good-bye as the car pulled away from the curb?

  Something tells me I didn’t even cry.

  I MEET HELEN ONCE AFTER THAT, at the age of thirty. It’s one of the few occasions where I see my mom, on a trip back to Minneapolis. Helen comes over to be part of the visit and brings a box of old pictures with her.

  I’ve never seen myself as a baby before.

  There are a dozen or more photos of me with my dad—him always holding me, me always adorably dressed—and five or six of me with Helen. She was attractive then, with remarkably long, pretty arms. Besides her tight smile, she seems to like me okay. There are only two photos of me with Linda, both at Christmas. I’m about four, so it must have been my last Christmas with her. As far as I know I was already in foster care, but maybe they let me see her, just for the holiday. In one picture, I’m on the floor, opening presents. In the other, I’m sitting on her lap, my smile especially big and bright. As I study the photograph, I notice that this feeling of sitting on her lap is like an heirloom I accidentally put out at a yard sale for a dollar. It’s long gone. And I’m a little sick about it.

  Helen watches as I go through the pictures, here and there filling in names, and details, and places. She’s sitting in a nearby armchair, nursing a whiskey-Seven. But even though we are only three or four feet apart, she hardly even looks at me, I mean really looks.

  After talking to Phyllis, maybe I know why.

  JUNE AND I ARE JUST TWO DOORS AWAY from seeing Daddy—our door and his. The guard is unlocking ours right now, and we are ushered into a large visiting room, perhaps seventy-five feet long and twenty feet wide. There are chairs lining the walls, and each is paired with another chair that faces it, separated by a little brown Formica-topped table with silver legs. The table is the Rio Grande. It looks like just a hop, skip, and a jump to the other side. But it’s another country over there. You can’t put your body on the other side, except to hold hands.

  Unless you are a little girl. Then you can sit on your daddy’s lap all day, and no one says a word.

  The waiting room is full—since we’re so late—and we have to cram ourselves near the far end of it. Once there, it’s another ten minutes or so, while the inmate goes through whatever process is required before the door at the other end of the waiting room opens and he walks through it. The anticipation could kill a person.

  Seeing him appear behind that door is just like when a contestant is introduced on a game show. The door slides open and Daddy’s standing there, with a giant smile on his face. I watch him stride toward me, giving a handshake or two to fellow inmates who are also receiving visitors that day. I can’t help but notice his impossibly shiny shoes and freshly pressed shirt and pants. Freddie always looks fabulous. It’s part of his brand.

  By this time, all that excitement has turned on me and I am quaking with bashfulness. June is giving me a little shove at the rump, but my legs aren’t cooperating. The closer Daddy gets, the harder it is to make eye contact, until—

  I’m swept up toward the ceiling in a large arc, and before I know it I am flying overhead, looking down on my dad, my feet artfully outstretched. All those hours I’ve been logging down at the Jenny Lind Elementary ice rink (it’s just the baseball field flooded with water) have obviously paid off. Everyone’s watching us like we’re the 1971 Russian Olympic pairs champions. Then, just as gracefully, my feet land back on the floor.

  That’s when he attacks me with smothering kisses.

  “Give your dad some sugar!” He’s shouting. “How’s my little gyurl?”

  Honestly? I could use a Dramamine. This is all way too much. I stand there, staring at a crack on the floor, with a stupefied smile on my face.

  “Let me get a look at you, gyurl.” My dad steps back and gives me the once-over. He’s got a checklist of things we have to go over about my appearance before we can get started. Sort of like when you get a rental car and you have to initial any dings before you drive off the lot or pay dearly for them when you get back.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to stand like that? C’mon now.” He tilts my hyperextended knees from their weird double-jointed position back to straight. This is always the very first thing he says to me, so it’s not quite as harsh as it sounds. Besides, I agree with him. It looks really dumb when I stand like that. (I’ve never thought to tell him this, but he’d be proud to know I never stand like that in my adulthood. Parents try, you know. And sometimes it works.)

  There’s a first prize for my dress and an honorable mention for my anklets-and-patent-leather-shoes combination. Then we take our seats, June on the visitor’s side and Daddy on the prisoner’s side. The visit has officially begun.

  And we’re in time for the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Man alive! Things are gonna be okay after all.

  The visit passes in a blur of playing cards, vending machines, cigarette smoke (other people’s, not ours), paint-with-water books, Barbies, and whatever else I brought in there to play with. There’s the occasional frown from the guard when I get too loud or too rambunctious. I can’t help it if it gets dull when June and Freddie are talking about grown-up things like attorneys, and sentences, and parole, and my dad’s case. They also talk about other McMillans, Linda, me, my schoolwork, my social workers, and the Hennepin County Welfare Department.

  And before you know it, it’s over. Usually, not a moment too soon. Visiting is exciting, but in the most boring possible way. I get a wavy feeling in my stomach when it’s time to say good-bye. It’s a little harder and more forceful than the sick feeling I get on my way in. I guess because I know I’m not going to see my dad again for another six months.

  At the end of visiting hours, the inmates are allowed to make physical contact with their visitors. Since most of the visitors are women in love with inmates, the closing minutes can be quite an eye popper. I think I even saw a boner or two. Or at the very least, felt a lot of boner-type energy.

  I, for one, am okay with that.

  Because all that intensity gives me something to pay attention to besides this terrible feeling, already traveling up my arms and through my ears and into the back of my eyes:

  I miss my dad.

  IT’S BEEN THREE MONTHS and I haven’t looked at that dating website again, but I haven’t forgotten about it, either. I’ve been too busy working my way through the tail end of this stupid breakup with Bryan, which is turning out to be a much bigger deal than I would have thought.

  There’s a saying: “If I’m hysterical, it’s
historical.” Any time my reaction to a thing is wayyyy bigger than the thing itself, chances are I am dealing with a core issue, something deeper perhaps than losing the best guitar player I’ve ever collaborated with.

  Lately, it’s all I can do to go to my part-time TV news job, make my son’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, drive him to kindergarten, and cry my eyes out until it’s time to pick him up again.

  I’ve cried so hard and for so long I know it can’t possibly be about Bryan, since he was actually a little bit of a dweeb who may have been smart and handsome and talented but was hardly a guy anyone would mistake for my true partner. Except maybe me.

  Obviously, I am grieving a much bigger loss. Of Daddy. And Mommy. It shouldn’t surprise me that this breakup has triggered it—this is the first of all my breakups since college where the guy dumped me. No wonder I’ve never allowed this to happen! To paraphrase the old saying, it’s better to have loved a little bit less than to have loved a lot and been left afterward.

  I am doing all kinds of things to “get over it,” not realizing that there is no getting over it. There’s only getting through it. I spend my thirty-ninth birthday naked, in the pitch-blackness of an Indian sweat lodge (improbably located in a backyard in Van Nuys), getting in touch with my spirit animals and working through my abandonment issues. I would put quotes around “spirit animals” and “abandonment issues” but I’m not even joking. I broke it down in there. Or maybe I just broke down.

  There’s another saying: “Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, because eventually, they’ll get in touch with you.” Yeah, they will. Through your spirit animals.

  Fall of 2003 passes in a veil of tears, and by New Year’s Eve leading into 2004, I’m ready to let it all go. I leave a lame party at 12:02 A.M. and go home to perform a ritual I heard about where you write down every single thing that you want to let go of from the past year on little slips of paper. Then you officially Let GoTM of those things by burning the papers in the flame of a candle. You feel like you are in a New Age bookstore when you do this, but you don’t really care because you also feel like you are doing something to bring about desperately needed change, too.

  Then, on another set of little slips of paper (this ritual involves a lot of little slips of paper, which is way better than involving chicken blood), I write down everything I want to bring into my life in the coming year, setting the intention to receive it now. NOW!

  At the top of my list: a love relationship.

  It’s a big deal that I can even acknowledge this. I’ve spent my life looking for and finding relationships (or is it hunting down and killing them?), but nevertheless, it’s hard for me to say out loud that having a man, loving a man, being in a long-term, committed relationship with a man, is really important to me. Maybe because I grew up in the seventies, where I heard that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

  Well, fuck that. I’m tired of being politically correct. I need a man; I’ll just say it.

  So yesterday, I went back on that website, ready to not just try harder but to try differently. The first thing I did was search for “that guy,” the one I’d seen while using Lisa’s password.

  He’s still there. In his loft, downtown.

  My heart beats a little bit faster as I get out my credit card and pay the fee, then upload my picture and write a short, sweet profile.

  I like pale blue water, vintage things, and places I’ve never been.

  Then, I “wink” at him.

  I’m nervous because once I click that mouse, I know that I am stuck—I can never get that wink back—and whatever happens from here is out of my control.

  But I shake that feeling off and go on with my day.

  Four

  I Love You, and I Can’t Live Without You

  MY DADDY IS HOME! He got out on parole, after four years in Leavenworth. All of us—June, Gene, and the five Ericson children—went down to the airport with balloons and a hand-painted banner reading welcome home freddie! When he stepped through the airplane door into the terminal, I rushed into his arms. It was a lot like my favorite TV show, Truth or Consequences, where guys coming home from the war are reunited with their trembling wives on national television. The only thing missing was Bob Barker.

  Daddy has moved into a halfway house and we’ve been dating seeing each other regularly. Sometimes, he comes for Sunday services at Hope Lutheran, looking fly. After church we walk down the block to the parsonage (that’s what the minister’s home is called)—my dad in his platforms and Qiana shirt, surrounded by the Ericson girls, who are all dressed for a Billy Graham Crusade. At home June has a pot roast surrounded by carrots, potatoes, and onions in the oven for Sunday dinner.

  Other times Daddy and I go out together, just the two of us. Mostly, we like to drive around. We say we’re going shopping, or fishing, or to the zoo, but what we really do is turn the radio up and roll the car windows down, and get our cruise on.

  My dad’s car is huge, with doors so big I can’t shut them by myself unless I’m standing up. The seats are white leather and the windows go up and down automatically when you push a little metal doodad on the armrest. It’s awfully cool. And a long, long way from that new Mercury Comet the Ericsons just bought.

  “Can we get some beef jerky?” I ask.

  I love beef jerky. It’s salty and chewy and I like to chew on things. It gives me something to do with my nervous energy.

  “Absolutely,” my dad says as he single-handedly swings the steering wheel, the size of an extra-large pizza, in the direction of the corner store. “Whatever you’d like, darling.”

  I don’t ask my dad for things as much as I put in a request. There’s never any question that I will get what I have asked for, as long as it’s within reason. It’s just a matter of time, which means there’s no need to wheedle and no manipulation necessary. It’s not that he’s trying to buy my love. It’s that he doesn’t see any reason to deny me.

  “And can I get some Pixy Stix, too?”

  I love beef jerky, but I’m obsessed with Pixy Stix, the powdered SweeTart-like candy that comes in a paper tube decorated with a colorful swirl. Pixy Stix are the crack cocaine of candy. Pure, unadulterated sugar, laced with tangy ascorbic acid. So addictive, you might as well just smoke the motherfuckers. Or shoot them up.

  “Sure, little gyurl. Pixy Stix, too.”

  We head over to Humboldt Drug, where usually I have to shoplift my candy because I need much more than the Ericsons think is reasonable. In minutes I am contentedly munching on leathery beef as we drive around North Minneapolis, listening to soul music on the radio.

  Until my dad and I started chilling together, I didn’t even know Minneapolis had a soul station. “Me and Mrs. Jones” is my favorite song. It has a sad melody that matches the way I feel inside a lot better than Andy Williams’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” or whatever it is that June is always listening to in her car. I also like “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays and “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” by the Four Tops. My musical taste apparently hints at my emotional life—all about lying, cheating, and being left.

  “Can we go to the record store?”

  “Sure, baby,” my dad says, “we can go to the record store.” It’s just a normal sentence, but when my dad says it, it sounds like he’s about to start laughing. My dad thinks everything that comes out of my mouth is terribly amusing. He has this way of looking at me when I talk—he pays very close attention, much more than adults usually do, and he listens very carefully, smiling but not mocking. The most accurate word for it, I think, is “delight.” He delights in pretty much whatever I say.

  I already know what I’m going to get—the new Sonny and Cher record. My dad has bought me every single one of their albums, except for the one from Cher’s fur-vest-and-straight-bangs era, which I don’t want. The new album has pictures of the inside of Sonny and Cher’s Beverly Hills mansion—all blue velvet upholstery and sumptuous furnishings�
�which I will spend hours poring over, in an early intuitive form of creative visualization. I wouldn’t dare tell anyone this, but what I really want to be when I grow up is Cher. One time I told one of my social workers this and she gave me a very funny look. So now whenever anyone asks, I just say I want to be a nurse.

  We walk out of the record store loaded with music. In addition to my new Cher porn, I’ve got a half-dozen 45s: “Little Willy” by Sweet, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence, and “Sing” by the Carpenters. I’ll play them on the turquoise portable record player my dad bought me a few outings ago.

  “Hey, baby. You want to go fishing?”

  “Yeah!” I shout. My dad knows I love to fish. It’s pretty much the only time I’m able to sit absolutely still.

  But it’s too late to go get our fishing poles and buy some worms and head to Cedar Lake to get in a boat for some real fishing, so my dad pulls over near Shingle Creek (locally pronounced “crick”), a tiny riverlike body of water that wends its way through North Minneapolis. (South Minneapolis has its own crick, called Minnehaha Creek.) It’s sunny out, and little bits of gold dapple the surface of the water where the light is filtering through the elm trees. The creek is too cold to really step into, but there are little pools of shallow water near the edge where it’s fun to stick your hand in and pull out a pretty rock. Sometimes if you break them open, they have the mesmerizing concentric circles of an agate.

  “Look!” I blurt out, pointing at a school of minnows that has taken up residence in a tiny eddy. “Baby fish!”

  I’m really excited. But it’s not enough for me to just witness the beauty of the minnows. I want to catch one. I try to trap one of the wriggly little suckers in my cupped hands. I’m not even close.

  “Wait a minute,” Freddie says. I turn to see him trekking back up the short embankment toward the car. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”