by Lily King
I figure it is time to ask about work. “What happened with Hugh, Dad?”
“Fuck him.”
“What happened?”
“That’s over with. I’ve retired.”
When we get home, there is a message on the machine in the kitchen. “Hey there, Gardiner, it’s Patrick. I’ll call another time. All right. Hope you’re well.” You can tell he was nervous. The message is breathy and full of lurches, not really Patrick’s normal phone voice, which is, at least with me, as goofy as he was as a kid. It makes me miss him. I’ll call him as soon as I get away from here.
“You should call him back.”
“I’m not calling him back and you’re not either, you hear me?”
“He adores you, Dad. You can’t just drop him.”
Watch me, his eyes say, glaring at mine.
He goes upstairs and changes into his new pants and blue socks with geese flying on them. I go to the bathroom off the den and stare for a long time at the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall, my father’s team pictures from St. Paul’s and Harvard, rows and rows, years and years, of white English-looking boys holding oars and footballs and tennis racquets. I have seen these so many times I can quickly find my father in each one, his small nervous face in the earlier ones, when he was only eleven and twelve, and then his more mature, impatient expressions later on. Clearly no one was encouraged to smile in photographs back then, so it is impossible to say if he, or anyone, was happy.
He fixes himself a drink when he comes downstairs. It isn’t yet noon. We sit by the pool. I bring out tuna fish sandwiches, and we play backgammon while we eat them. The sun beats down. The pool glimmers and beckons. I’m not sure I still own a bathing suit, and if I do it’s buried in a garbage bag somewhere in my stuffed car.
He makes trips to the poolhouse to refill his glass. I watch his bowed spine, his splayed step, the need on the way in and the fulfillment on the way out, that first sip of a fresh drink, eyelids swooning shut, lips amphibious, reaching out and around the curve of the glass, desperate to make contact with the alcohol. Sixteen more hours until I can drive away from the sight of it.
The sun sears my back.
“Aren’t you hot, Dad?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe we should move under the tree.”
“No.”
He beats me.
“Have a swim,” he says.
“Will you?”
“Nah. Not today.”
“I guess I could just jump in in my clothes.”
“Take ‘em off. No one’s looking.”
He leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes.
I jump in in my shirt and shorts. The water is colder than I ever remember it. Everything in my body withdraws, as if trying to contract to a single point. By the time I reach the shallow end I can’t feel the skin on my legs. As I get out, the water rolls off them as if over rubber.
My father is laughing. “I thought you’d at least test it with your toe!”
“What’d you do, fill it with ice cubes?”
“Haven’t turn on the heat yet.” He wipes his eyes. “You should have seen your face. Priceless.”
I flick water from my hair at him.
“Nice tits.”
“Dad.”
“Why do you wear such baggy clothes? You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, believe me.”
I can’t find my voice.
My father rolls doubles and hoots.
“I would appreciate it,” I begin, shakily, “if you would not speak of my body like that again.”
“And I would appreciate it if you would just roll the dice. I was giving you a compliment.”
Eventually he goes inside to take a nap. Fourteen more hours.
I call Jonathan from the poolhouse but only get the machine. I love the quick rumble of his voice. I feel like calling back just to hear the recording of it again. In a week we’ll live in a cottage in California together. Stop saying California like it’s so important. It is important. It is deeply important to me. What if one of us doesn’t make it out there safely? I’m bad at trusting the future. It seems suddenly improbable that both of us will make it there alive. I have an urge to get in my car and outrun fate.
I get up off the floor of the poolhouse and go back out into the heat. I cross the grass to the tennis court. I reimagine the rose garden, the scrolled bushes, the faint blue paint of the fountain’s basin, the smell of the black leaves when we cleaned it out the first nice day of spring. I see my mother in her kerchief and gardening gloves and me asking her as she sprays for aphids what a French kiss is. She wore bright cotton shifts, laughed loudly when Bob Wuzzy or Sylvie Salters was over, had so many convictions. And then in Paul she found a true partner, a fellow believer, and I would hear them on the couch late into the night talking about his cases, about the abuse of children and the rights of minorities, talking seriously, though laughter would always burst out unexpectedly. It didn’t include me, and maybe that accounted for some of my sullenness with them, but it’s still my idea of love, of harmony, that sound of them on the couch with all their beliefs and hopes and laughter.
I think I fall asleep in the grass. The next thing I hear is the snap of the screen door. I look up and my father is crossing the lawn again, showered, in another new pair of pants, drink in hand. Martini number five? Six?
“Ahhh,” he says loudly, for my benefit, as he sits down. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”
Twelve hours. Or I can leave at five in the morning, not six. Eleven more hours, then.
“I’m going to start cooking.”
“It’s barely six.”
“Early supper tonight.” Again like my mother, speaking cheerfully while fleeing the place he was, her words shot through with a lightness she did not feel but needed for protection.
I try to cook slowly. Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, lima beans. More foods of my childhood. I wonder what he’d do if I served him a tofu curry or bi bim bap and laugh out loud, imagining his over-reaction. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of him through the window, sitting and staring at the pool. He makes his trips to the bar in the poolhouse; he switches from the chaise to a chair. The dogs follow him, resettle against his feet. When a neighborhood dog barks, all four of them lift their heads and tilt their ears, Maybelle rising to her feet. My father speaks to them. Settle down, fellas, settle down, he’s saying.
Before I call him in, I drag the old glass-top table from the pantry back into the kitchen where it belongs. I set it with some old linens Catherine never used that I find in the dining room. They are perfectly pressed—my mother would have sent them to the dry cleaners—and smell of the pine of the sideboard drawer they have sat in for the past two decades. I remember the pattern, small white daisies on cornflower blue. The creases in the tablecloth stand firm no matter how many times I smooth it. The napkins are slightly frayed at the corners, but when I stand back everything looks as lovely as it used to be.
I don’t know how he’ll react. The table in this position is where my mother left her note before we left. But my father, when he comes in, seems not to notice at all. He is breathing in his heavy, drunk way. He puts his glass above the knife and sits in his old seat, the seat facing the stove, as if that intervening score of years never happened.
He eats the meat first. It disgusts me, the thin bone, the dead baby flesh, but I can’t help watching him eat. I feel like I’m seven years old again. The sound of his breathing, the sweat on his brow and nose, the vodka and onions and tobacco create a sort of disorienting fog that obscures the present for long moments at a time.
“Dad, will you promise me right now you will take care of yourself?” I say, to shake off the spell.
“I will.” He looks up from his plate. “This is good, by the way.”
“And you’ll make yourself vegetables?”
“Yup.” He scoops three lima beans onto his fork unconvincingly.
I want to ask him w
hat on earth he plans to do with himself for the rest of his life. He’s only sixty.
He eats a few bites of the mashed potato, pushes the lima beans around a bit, and sits back. I see how drunk he is then, just before he begins speaking. “And you’ll take care of yourself, too, Daley?” I don’t like the way he says my name. He says it like Catherine used to say it, Day-lee.
“I will.”
“You’ll go shut yourself up in another Commie college and get even more asinine ideas in your head about the way the world should be and how everyone who ever lived before you got it all wrong?”
“I guess so.”
“Let me ask you something,” he says, pointing his fork tines at my chest. “Let me ask you. Did they ever make you study the Second World War? Did they ever teach you about this country and what it did for the world? The sacrifices that were made to save all those goddamn people who now just want to stick it up our asses? I’ll tell you what’s fucked up. What’s fucked up is everything that happened after 1955. That’s what they should be teaching you. Everything—everything—they are teaching you is a crock of shit, and you people are all so far gone you don’t even know it. You don’t have a clue.”
He leans forward and hoists himself up. He takes a few steps to the bar and then realizes he didn’t bring his glass and comes back for it. I see how it will be when I leave, and an image of him on the floor of his bathroom comes to me.
Ten hours. I can do this. I can say something. “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to drink yourself to death.”
He slams the glass on the counter of the bar. “You know what, Day-lee. Just go off to college—again. For the third decade. Spend your whole life in college. Don’t grow up. And take all your faux concern for me with you.”
“It’s not faux, Dad.” I’m surprised he has that word in his vocabulary.
“Yeah, well,” he mutters, going through his rites at the bar and returning with an exceptionally full glass, “you know why I drink? You know why? I drink because of people like you, people who think they are so perfect, who think they have all the ans—”
“I do not think I am perfect. By any means.”
“Good, because you are not perfect. You’re a disaster. You’re an embarrassment. You and your brother.” He puts his hands on his head as if they can stop his thoughts of us. And then he looks right at me with his yellow eyes. “You two are everything I’m ashamed of.”
I put down my knife and fork. I’m done taking this shit. “And you should be ashamed. You should be dying of shame. Because your two children didn’t get a father. They got a monster. They got a drunk, ignorant bigot who poisoned them with pure bile.” My argument begins to form itself. I have so much proof. I’m going to shove all my memories in his face.
He laughs. No, he doesn’t laugh, but there is no word for the noise my father makes when he is surprised and furious at the same time. “You know something. You turned out worse than your mother, you little bitch.”
The mention of my mother, his first since she died nine years ago, slits my vocal cords clean through. All I can do is get myself out of the room and up the stairs.
I cry on my bed with the despair of a child. I keep telling myself to get up and drive away. But I can’t. I feel pinned down by the weight of all the years and insults. I can hear him downstairs, doing the dishes, letting the dogs out, letting them back in. It’s a normal night for him. A quart of vodka, a vicious argument. He probably feels damn good, like he’s just played two sets of tennis. I worry he might even try to say good night to me, so I hoist myself up long enough to lock the bedroom door. The feel of the lock in my fingers is so familiar to me. It’s a little silver macaroni-shaped thing with a deep solid thunk when the thick tongue falls into place. I can practically feel my mother on the other side of the door, pleading with me to come down and say hello to Cousin Grace who’s come up from Westport. But I don’t want to. I’ve just gotten out the big wicker picnic basket of Barbies and their camper from the closet and am settling in for the afternoon. I do not want to have tea with Cousin Grace.
Back on the bed, I think of Paul and how respectful and patient he always was with me, how he did edify me after all, and how now I’m certain I didn’t write him back after he bought the house. I’m the closest thing to a child he ever had. I cry for him and how his grief at losing my mother was too much for me at the time, and how we couldn’t help each other and how it was easier for me to just close the door on him and all his evocations of her, my mother, who loved me but did not protect me, who let me go off every weekend for years and years to my father’s even though I returned a wild animal and she never asked why.
12
If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough. I feel certain, as one does in bed in the dark, that if I can line up the right sequence of thoughts I can solve the problem of my father, the problem of me and my father in the same room. My mind circles. But at some point through the thin lids of my eyes I begin to feel the slightest lifting of the night from the sky, and then I’m liberated from the cell of these useless thoughts, and I see eucalyptus trees, a narrow road, and a yellow door with a pale green window. My heart begins to pound. I’m free again. The little hollow of the driver’s seat is waiting for me. The radio works. Jonathan had it fixed for me last week. I’ll stop at Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. I’ll sit in the booth my mother and I sat in on the way to Lake Chigham. As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.
The hallway is dark, the air moist. I smell the cedar balls in the old chest as I pass it. If I go down the front stairs I’ll see my father, who always leaves his door ajar. But the back stairs are a straight shot to the kitchen and out the door. These steps are steep and I take them slowly, the wallpaper with its relief of ivy and berries beneath my fingers as I descend, the worn steps full of old smells, and then the humming refrigerator at the bottom, the little wedge of space between it and the wall I used to fit in neatly, so warm in winter. The big dogs are downstairs for some reason. They leap to their feet when they see me.
“Don’t get up, fellas,” I whisper, giddy. “Please.”
They try to block my path. For the first time since I’ve been here, they seem to think I’m in charge. They seem to think I should be feeding them, and they push their noses into my thighs.
The table is clean, cleared of dishes, the blue cloth still on it with just a few grease spots from the lamb. In his careful, slanted boarding-school script my father has written: The pills should do the trick. Goodbye, Daley.
There are neurologists who postulate that we have not one but as many as eight brains tucked in our heads. At that moment I’m proof of it. Some of my brains are trying to misinterpret his words. Pills for the dogs? Antidepressants he didn’t tell me about? And some of my brains just want me to keep moving. He’s lying, one says. It’s a trick, says another. But one brain knows that my father and Catherine have a medicine cabinet full of painkillers and sleeping pills.
I find him on his bed in his clothes on top of the covers. He’s breathing but I can’t wake him. I’m still not sure it isn’t a trick, but I pick up the phone.
I press 911, then wonder if it’s 411, then wonder which one I actually pressed. But a woman is on the line, asking me what happened and quickly with sirens there are people in the house and a stretcher and my father’s eyes open but he can’t tell them what he took or how much. There’s no trace of anything by his bed and none of the many prescription bottles in his bathroom are completely empty.
They pump his stomach. Seven Bayer aspirin.
A psychologist comes to talk to me in the waiting area. He has the eyebrows of a surprised cartoon character,
thick diagonal charcoal smudges.
“He’s very lucky,” he says quietly.
“Don’t I know it. Another twenty and he could have irritated his stomach.”
The man’s eyebrows invert and become quite stern. “This was a serious cry for help, young lady,” he says, though he can’t be more than five years older than me. “People cross a line when they take pills, no matter their efficacy. Your father might very well have believed seven aspirin would do the trick. And the statistics are that he will make another attempt and it will be more dramatic. He will need to be monitored closely.”
“I am leaving for California today. I won’t be monitoring anything.”
“They told me you were his daughter.”
“I am.”
“Your father has attempted suicide.”
“He drinks on a temperate day six or seven strong martinis. In my opinion he has been trying to commit suicide most days for the past thirty or forty years.” I feel so still and cold inside. I feel like I could rip this man’s lungs out if I tried, and you can hear it in my voice. Goddamn my fucking father for doing this now.
He scrawls something at the bottom of the white page on his clipboard and rubs his face.
“I specifically asked if there was alcohol abuse because of the blood tests I saw, and his doctor assured me absolutely not.”
“His doctor is one of his oldest drinking buddies. Not a reliable narrator.”
He nods, makes crosshatches in the top corner of his sheet of paper. “Are you familiar with the term intervention?”
I laugh. Hard. “Let’s see. His second wife just left him, his son claims never to want to see him alive again, his parents are dead, he has no siblings, and his friends should all be in rehab themselves. That would leave me and him in a room. I’d have a better chance in the Coliseum with a bunch of lions.”