by Ann Hood
Until he stopped.
“Okay,” he said. “Go straight down the road for about a quarter of a mile to Crescent Street. Not even. Then turn left and then right and you’re on Chester.”
A quarter of a mile? Sparrow thought. How many blocks is that? Two? Ten? A hundred and ten?
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“I live right here.” He pointed to a small white house trimmed in multi-colored Christmas lights. Above them hung a street sign. Myrtle Street.
“Oh,” Sparrow said.
He turned and walked away from her. Sparrow wanted to shout to him to come back and walk her the whole way. She watched him walk into the little house. A quarter of a mile, she said to herself. Not even.
She was surprised at how quickly she reached Crescent Street. Sparrow turned left and then right and sure enough, just as he had promised, she was on Chester Street.
The street had very few houses. The ones there were larger than on Myrtle Street, and shabby. Most of them had big front porches and Sparrow could see Christmas trees in every window that she passed. She was struck by the quiet, not a sound. In the distance, a dog barked twice and then was silent.
Chester Street ended in a tangle of trees, all with a thick frosting of snow. Sparrow’s father’s house was the last one on the street. Even in the darkness and with all the snow, Sparrow could see that it needed to be painted. There was a light on in an upstairs window and a Christmas tree downstairs with small twinkling white lights. A cracked streetlight provided enough light for Sparrow to see her way up the front steps to the porch.
It was then, as she opened the porch door, that the enormity of her situation hit her. She was at her father’s doorstep. Sparrow took a deep breath and entered the porch. It was filled with assorted boots and sneakers and jackets. A couch was sloppily draped in a dark green bedspread with ragged fringe. Sparrow peered through the smudgy glass of the front door. She stood, with her hand tightly gripping the doorknob, for a minute, trying to see inside. Then she turned the knob and gasped as the door creaked loudly open. Quickly she pulled it shut. The door stuck slightly, then closed. Sparrow gulped and pressed her forehead against the glass. She could not believe that the door was unlocked, that she had opened it and then slammed it shut so loudly that the neighbors might have heard it. She could not believe that she was at her father’s doorstep. She wanted to run.
Someone approached the door from inside the house. She stood away from the door and it swung open. There, standing before Sparrow, was her father. His dark blond hair was shorter than in the picture, and wavy, and he had a dark red beard. When he saw Sparrow he squinted and scowled at her.
“Are you lost or something?” he said. “Do you know what time it is?”
Sparrow stood on the cluttered porch, her mouth opened slightly, and gulped again.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m Sparrow,” she said finally.
Her father’s eyes widened.
“Why are you here? Has something happened to Suzie?”
It took her a moment to realize that Suzie was her mother. She had never heard anyone call her that before.
Sparrow shook her head. Right now she wanted to be back in Boston, in her own bed. This was not right at all. When she said her name, her father should have hugged her. He should have done something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must be freezing. Come in.”
Sparrow followed him inside. The house was cold and smelled of smoke. The rooms were square and small, like Christmas-present boxes. Her father led her to a room in back. Sparrow couldn’t tell if it was a living room or a dining room. It was lit by a small lamp with a shade that had pictures of covered wagons on it. A cupboard painted a flat Colonial blue held a spoon collection. New Jersey. Vermont. Ohio. Sparrow tried to picture her mother here, sitting in the faded brown La-Z-Boy chair in her neatly ironed skirt and stiff Oxford shirt. She frowned. This was not right, Sparrow thought.
SPARROW AND HER FATHER sat across from each other at the red metal table in the center of the room. It had a large yellow and green rooster design in the middle. Her father had called her mother. He had given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to Sparrow and then gone into the next room and called her mother. He spoke in hushed tones. The windows had dark green shades on them and Sparrow lifted one and looked out at the snow. It fell rapidly to a certain point, then lifted back upward slightly before hitting the ground. When the phone call was over, Sparrow closed the shade and sat at the table with her father. They stared across the rooster at each other.
“She’s getting married,” Sparrow said.
Her father nodded.
“I mean,” she continued, “to someone else. She’s marrying someone else.”
Her father nodded again.
“And,” Sparrow began as she fought back tears, “she…she insists on calling me Susan.”
“Susan?”
“She says that Sparrow is a silly name.”
Her father smiled. There were a lot of lines around his eyes.
“I wanted to meet you,” Sparrow blurted out. There was a hysterical edge to her voice now. “A person should know her own father, shouldn’t she?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Well, then.”
Sparrow gulped a few times, very quickly.
“I have one picture of you,” she said. “That’s it. All that you are is a man in a picture.” She felt as if she were going to cry.
“Look,” her father said. “Look at these.” He shook some snapshots out of a bag that he had brought in from the next room.
Sparrow picked one up, studied it. The man in it was certainly her father, looking just like he did in the picture she had. The woman beside him had long wheat-colored hair. She wore faded blue jeans and a man’s shirt. They were standing in front of the bright green van. Sparrow looked at her father.
“That’s Suzanne,” he said. “That’s your mother.”
Sparrow looked at the picture again. Yes, it was her mother, all right. Slowly, she picked up the other pictures. In all of them her mother’s hair is long and wild. She is wearing old sweaters and baggy men’s shirts. In all of them, she is smiling.
“What a beauty, huh?” her father said as he picked up a picture.
Sparrow looked at him. He looked sad. And old. He wore a shabby brown cardigan that pulled tightly across his stomach.
“She looks different now,” Sparrow said, to make him feel better somehow.
Her father nodded. “I haven’t seen her for years. Since you came for Christmas one time. You were so little I guess you don’t remember that.”
Sparrow smiled. “I do,” she said. “I do remember. The tree was so big. And it had tiny white lights.”
“You thought they were snowflakes.”
“Where did we live then?”
“In Boston. You and your mother always lived in Boston.”
Sparrow’s heart raced with excitement. Even though he no longer looked like the man in the picture, this was her father. He said she thought the lights were snowflakes.
“I don’t know what to ask first,” she said.
“I’m a poet,” he said shyly. “Your mother used to love my poems. For a time. Then she wanted me to go to Boston with her and teach English while she went to graduate school.”
Sparrow sighed. That was it. He had wanted to stay here in Maine and write poetry and her mother had wanted to leave. Climb the corporate ladder, Sparrow thought angrily.
“It was a wonderful time,” her father said, “when we lived on the beach in a tiny house. We were so happy.”
“Just the three of us, huh? Then she had to go and ruin it all.”
Her father looked surprised. “Well, that’s partly right. I mean, your mother told me, ‘We can’t live on poetry.’ But,” he hesitated. Sparrow waited.
“Don’t you know that having you was the bravest thing your mother could have done? Sh
e went to Boston by herself, she knew she was pregnant…” He hesitated again.
“Wait a minute,” Sparrow said as she tried to put the pieces together. “When did we live at the beach? The three of us, I mean.”
“Sparrow,” her father said, “you’ve got it all wrong. I mean, it wasn’t really your mother’s fault. I mean, the thing is, we lived together in that little house, Suzie and I did. I wrote my poetry and she finished up school and then she applied to all these graduate programs. And she got into the one in Boston and then found out she was pregnant. I mean, we never got married, Sparrow. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to get married or teach English or move to Boston.”
“You didn’t want me,” Sparrow whispered.
Her father bowed his head.
“Why did we come back here that Christmas?”
“To show me how well it had all turned out, I guess. Suzanne wanted me to know that I had made a big mistake.”
“I don’t want to be here,” Sparrow said. “I want to go home.”
“Sparrow—”
“How could you not want me?” she said. In the movies this would be the part where she would run out and go back to Boston. But Sparrow knew there was no way back tonight. Instead, she ran out of the room.
A woman, dressed in a full, long nightshirt, was standing in the next room. Her hair hung to her shoulders, pale blond and thin. It was not until she grabbed Sparrow’s arm that Sparrow saw the wedding ring on the woman’s finger.
“Sparrow,” she said in a musical voice.
“Leave me alone,” Sparrow said wearily, but she did not try to break free.
“Sparrow, I know how you must feel. But that was all so long ago. Your father is really a very good man.” Then, “He writes such beautiful poetry, you know,” as if that mattered.
Her father came into the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sparrow sunk onto the couch, felt the broken springs deep inside the cushions.
“I’ve had a picture of you,” she said.
Her father sat beside her.
“You’ve had a lot of ideas,” he said.
Sparrow nodded. She was thinking that she couldn’t stay here and live in the woods like she had imagined. She had wanted her father to be someone who loved her and wanted her, a slim man, outfitted at L. L. Bean perhaps, and smoking a pipe. “It broke my heart,” this imaginary father would say, “when your mother went to Boston.” He would make her thick grainy pancakes in his log cabin. He would hug her close and say, “It really broke my heart.”
It was beginning to get light now, and the snow had almost stopped. Sparrow looked at the man who was her father. His wife with the musical voice stood beside him.
“I’ll get some blankets,” his father’s wife said. “This couch opens up into a bed.” She left the room quietly.
“We’ll get you back to Boston tomorrow,” her father said.
Sparrow nodded.
She and her father sat side by side on the sagging couch.
“Would you like to read a poem I wrote?”
“I don’t care,” Sparrow said.
He went into the back room and returned with a notebook.
“Read the first one,” he told her.
She opened the book and read. The poem was about a tiny sparrow who has to fly away when it is very young. It was not a well-written poem, but it made Sparrow’s eyes fill with tears and then, finally, she cried. Her father took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She imagined him sitting at the table with the rooster design on it, writing poetry late at night. She tried to place her mother in this image, but it was impossible. And she could not place herself here either, in this smoky house with the sagging furniture. She lifted her head and wiped her eyes. Her father looked neither like the picture she had in her mind nor like the photograph on her bureau.
Hesitantly, she smiled at him. His face relaxed for the first time since she had arrived. Sparrow nodded at him, and he tilted his head back and opened his mouth into a wide smile.
SPARROW HAD SLEPT ON the pullout couch without a real pillow. Her father’s wife, Melanie, had looked around the house for an extra pillow but couldn’t find one. Instead, she gave Sparrow two tiny square pillows with needle-point monograms on them. Abel’s initials were in blue, Melanie’s in yellow. Sparrow traced the letters on her father’s pillow.
His middle initial was F, a large blue curlicue F. The pillows were hard, and no matter how she arranged them under her head, they hurt. Finally, she put them on the floor.
In Boston, Sparrow’s bed was big, with three long goose-feather pillows wrapped in Marimekko cases. Along the borders of the walls, a painter had copied exactly the lollipoplike flowers in the sheets and bedspread and curtains. As a finishing touch, he had painted scattered flowers on the white floor. Just a few, here and there.
“You see,” Sparrow’s mother had said as she surveyed the finished room, “if you choose a theme and stick with it, it all will work out very nicely.”
Sometimes at night, Sparrow had the feeling even as she slept, that her mother was in the room, sitting on the bed, watching her. But in the morning, Suzanne showed no evidence of that. She moved around the apartment, starched and efficient, as if she had been in her own room the entire night. Once, though, Sparrow had woken up in the middle of the night and found her mother asleep beside her, still in her clothes from work. Sparrow had moved closer to her on the bed, and Suzanne had wrapped her in her arms. The next morning, Sparrow woke up alone and neither of them ever mentioned it.
Sparrow woke up in her father’s house to the sounds of a snowplow outside. She wandered through the square rooms until she reached her father and Melanie sitting at the rooster table. In the daylight, the colors in the house seemed faded, like an old book. She entered the room feeling uncomfortable and foreign.
“Did the phone wake you?” her father said.
She shook her head. “The snowplow.”
“Harry’s out there early this morning,” Melanie said. Then she added, “He drives the plow.”
“Oh,” Sparrow said.
Her father looked at her. “It was your mother who called. She’s coming to get you. Driving up.”
Hope returned to Sparrow. Her mother was coming here. She would see her father, see the desolation he lived in, and take him back to Boston with them. Or maybe they could all stay here, in Maine somewhere. He just needed some fixing up, after all. When he smiled at her the night before, Sparrow had seen the man from the picture. Perhaps her mother would see him too.
“How about some breakfast?” Melanie asked her.
“Sure.”
Melanie disappeared into the kitchen.
Sparrow smiled at her father.
“Well,” she said. “You two haven’t seen each other for a long time. You and Mom. It should be something, huh?”
Her father frowned. “Sparrow,” he said. “I’m married to Melanie, you know, and your mother is what? Engaged to someone, right?”
“Ron. He’s awful.”
“I don’t know, Sparrow. I understand why you came here. Maybe years ago I should have made more of an effort. Tried to see you or something. It just seemed so pointless.”
Sparrow felt the pain she had felt so many times about this man, her father, return. He had never wanted her.
“Pointless,” she said.
“You know, I never realized how Suzie would be about all this. How secretive.” He shook his head.
“I don’t even know your middle name,” Sparrow said, remembering the big blue curlicue F on the pillow. “Or where you’re from, where you were born or anything. And you’re my father. You know, even orphans can go and find out their father’s middle name. And you are my father.”
Sparrow saw sadness in his face, behind the beard and fleshy skin. His eyes had no sparkle in them. But sadness wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what she wanted. She imagined them together, walking through the snow, talking about their lives, sha
ring all the little things they had missed about each other, the kinds of stories families told over and over for years. Sparrow had sat at friends’ houses, around the dining room table or in a den, with snapshots in front of them, and listened as the family recalled special memories—a car horn sticking in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a child getting stuck in the chimney looking for Santa.
“One time,” Sparrow said to her father, “Mom and I went shopping at Filene’s. I was around eight years old. And I tried on this lady’s hat in the hat department. It was a fancy one, with netting and rhinestones and a big black feather in the back. I kept it on the whole time we shopped and wore it all the way home before Mom realized it. I mean, no one noticed it all day! The entire day!”
Her father looked baffled, then smiled politely.
“Sometimes, even now, when I go shopping, Mom will say, ‘Stay away from the hats!’”
They looked at each other.
Nothing is right here, Sparrow thought.
“It’s just a little thing I did,” Sparrow said. “It’s sort of a family joke now.”
He still didn’t see the point. Instead, he looked relieved when Melanie came in with two round toaster waffles. When Sparrow poured syrup on them, the waffles soaked it up like sponges.
“I can’t eat these,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat them.”
Sparrow went into the room that Melanie called the parlor. Heavy green drapes blocked the view outside. Sparrow had to wedge herself between the Christmas tree and an overstuffed bright green armchair to get to the window at all. And then she had to lift the heavy curtains to peer out. Behind her, on the chair, were two pillows. One had a parrot needlepointed on it, the other a dove.
“I can make you something else,” Melanie said from the doorway.
Sparrow shook her head.
“Well, then, I guess I’ll be on my way.”
Sparrow turned. Melanie had on an orange down coat and big rubber boots trimmed in bright yellow.
“It was very nice to meet you, Sparrow. I have to go to work now. I’m a cashier, down at the drugstore.”