by Karen Olsson
“It’s really up to you,” she would say.
“Won’t he need someone at the house with him? I could just come. I’m kind of between things anyway.”
“If you want to—”
“Well, I’m saying, if he needs somebody—”
“If you’re asking me whether he’ll manage without you, the answer is yes. If you’re asking me whether you should come see Dad who just had heart surgery—”
“He told me to wait until Thanksgiving.”
“Of course he would say that.”
“I’m trying to figure out the best time and how long to come for. If now’s the best time—”
“I can’t tell you what to do.”
The rehab place where my father had been sent was called the Renaissance Center. Naturally I pictured the staff prancing about in doublets and breeches, gnawing on big turkey legs. I couldn’t get Dad to tell me much about what it was actually like there. I would ask him questions you might ask a child. What did he eat for lunch? Had he made any friends? Never had he been more opaque to me. I couldn’t muster much to say, but I hated to hang up the phone and think of him returned to his wheeled bed, the emphysemic who shared the room, the TV. I asked Maggie, Do you think he’s depressed? I would be, she said.
On the day I finally left L.A., the sun was wearingly sharp, and the bougainvillea had metastasized, and suddenly I felt sure of my decision. I was going to Washington! It did occur to me that I was going not just to help my dad and maybe not even primarily to help my dad. Westward ho, that had been me in my twenties (pun intended), but now the winds were all blowing the other direction, to the east. In the nation’s capital, I would practice restraint. I would wear small gold earrings and date men who wore blazers. I would read the front section of the newspaper in its entirety. I would live like an East Coast city-dweller, without a car. These were the sorts of ideas that accompanied me to the District of Columbia, ideas of an entire new life I would lead, for a month or two at least. And! (I told myself) I would work on a Washington screenplay I’d started a few years earlier, neglected but not forgotten. I would reinvigorate it with on-site research. With boots on the ground!
Suddenly my boots—ankle boots—were on the ground. I had boarded an airplane, a red-eye, and instead of sleeping dropped eighteen bucks on three flagonets of Jack Daniels, which, I told myself, would be the last of my drinking for some time. It was a more serious city, Washington, and I intended to approach it soberly. And there I was, a woman in an out-of-season and out-of-style denim miniskirt stepping off a plane at Dulles, tipsy, stricken, already asking myself What have I done? What have I done?—already sensing the walls on every side of me encroaching, and the curved roof above my head about to come crashing down.
And there they were to greet me. All the Washington fathers. The terminal was full of them. I mean the men of Northwest and the near suburbs, men of the jogging paths, of the offices and lacrosse game sidelines, in their parkas and loafers. Analysts, economists, attorneys, administrators, lobbyists, consultants, chiefs of staff. A tribe of which my own father was a senior member, by age if not by rank. He’d insisted on taking a cab out to meet my flight, he said it would be fine, he had nothing better to do, and after following a stream of groggy Angelenos to the baggage claim I found him waiting there to claim me, my lanky, hapless father, smiling so brightly it made me want to look away. Baggage, oh yes. His broad face had a way of letting on more than he knew he was letting on, and no airplane cocktail was shield enough: my heart jumped up, the teenager in me shoved it back down, and I shut my eyes for a second, beholding there the reddish blooms of a detonating headache. I reminded that teenager to love him as I opened my arms, and we squeezed each other quickly.
He looked better than I’d feared he might. I’d worried that he would be stooped and drained and sallow. The person before me had the same pinkish skin he’d always had, and he was standing up straight, though he did seem diminished, he’d lost some muscle, I thought, and he took small, careful steps, moving with a guardedness that I also saw reflected in his eyes. Still he tried to lift my suitcase off the carousel, which was such a typical thing for him to do that I almost let him.
“I got it, Dad,” I said, cutting in front of him. I started toward the doors, toward ground transportation. He stopped me with the “Helen!” he’d been barking at me my whole life, the pronunciation of my name that means “stop.” He pointed the other way. “I brought the car,” he said.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to drive yet.”
“Do you know how much a cab costs, all the way out here and back?”
“You can afford it.”
“It’s just driving. It’s not like I went for a jog. They said four weeks, it’s been three…” He flapped one of his arms out to the side, as if to dispense with the remaining days.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I said, with a sharpness that sprang out of me, unbidden. He was already taking slow, pawing steps in the direction of the parking lots. Once, I’d followed those same legs around the hardware store, only they’d been so much larger then, his stride gigantic. I insisted I would drive.
It was almost November, and Virginia was nonsensically beautiful, the trees draped in their fall finery, and I wanted badly to smoke, though I hadn’t had a cigarette in years, or months at least, months that felt like years. Signs for Langley, McLean. New buildings dotted the road, dark gray boxes with mirrored windows. At LAX I’d seen at least a dozen uniformed military personnel, tramping around the terminal in their desert camouflage, buying People, eating frozen yogurt, and as we passed the mirrored buildings that, my dad had explained the last time I came home, were full of homeland security contractors, I thought of those soldiers whom I’d watched with curiosity and fleeting shame.
Whenever I came back to D.C. to visit, which I did once or twice a year, I found I didn’t explicitly remember how to get to most places, I couldn’t have given directions to anyone else, yet if you put me behind the wheel of a car I could generally find my way. Somewhere inside my brain was a subconscious map of the city (or certain parts of it), along with who knows how many other Washington imprints. Out of the corner of my eye I saw how tightly Dad was gripping the door handle, as though he were expecting me to crash any minute, and meanwhile I was on the verge of a different kind of crash. A distress signal trilled from within. My head was starting to hurt, which must’ve been the whiskey’s fault, or mostly the whiskey’s fault.
I remember a weekend afternoon when we sat at the kitchen table, Dad and I, with a big black cassette recorder between us, its heads spinning. My seventh-grade English teacher had given the class an assignment to interview an adult about his or her life and write a report, and I’d picked him. I asked questions like: What was your favorite subject in school? What were some trips you went on when you were a kid? Who were your friends? He put his elbows on the table and answered carefully but not directly, circling around the question until he landed on something that mattered to him, a story he thought was worth telling. That was the first time I heard him talk about Gerald Sayles, his favorite professor in college. He also told me about the time he and a roommate drove all the way to Guatemala, which was incredible to me, not merely that they drove there but that it was possible to drive to Guatemala at all. It was this trip, he said, that had been his introduction to Central America. I called my paper “The Biography of My Dad.” Three pages, handwritten, double-spaced. It had seemed to me far more grown-up and significant than any school assignment I’d ever completed before. And I remember how the Dad I interviewed seemed distinct from the Dad I knew, my first perception (muddy, prepubescent, wordless) of the difference between people as we come to know them and people as the subjects of the stories they tell about themselves, which are not about the lives we see them living but about their most cherished departures from regular life.
As an adult I had tried, off and on, to write a screenplay about Dad and the scandal that waylaid him. It was the
form I was most familiar with, and its demands—the tight structure, the periodic reversals—helped me to fill in the gaps. (Better to invent than to ask him directly. He never brought up the scandal, and neither did we.) In the draft I wrote, the government official “George Swansinger” blows the whistle on his boss, a well-intentioned but compromised national security advisor, with the help of a brassy female reporter. I never finished that script. The story I’d come up with wasn’t anything like what had happened in fact, and when I complained to other people that I was stuck, they invariably (if gently) questioned whether there was really a need, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, for an Iran-Contra movie of any kind. I had those same doubts myself, and eventually I set the project aside. I couldn’t get the tone right. It had toggled between satire and thriller, as though my only options were to ridicule Washington or to inject it with false drama.
My dad’s real name is Timothy George Atherton.
He had a small part in that whole mess, enough of a part that he was questioned by investigators and later summoned before the congressional joint committees, and for more than two years the threat of prosecution hung over him. But he was a peripheral figure, even in a scandal crowded with obscure people. Some of them were made famous by it—not him. After he testified, during the second month of hearings, the article in The Washington Post was cursory, with no accompanying photograph. The record of his testimony takes up only nineteen pages in the official proceedings, and there’s not much in those pages. He’s one more source for a committee already drowning in data, a committee impatient to move on. None of the honorable members (Cohen, Rudman, Hamilton et al.) imply that he himself was at fault; they hardly even bother to posture, for Dad wasn’t going to make the nightly news, although in his own life, this was the closest he ever came to Washington notoriety.
Page A16, lower left. “Singlaub, others, offer details on Contra funds.” He was one of the “others.” To this day I don’t know whether to think of him as a coconspirator or a complicit bystander or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He still lived in the house that had been our house, the house on Albemarle Street that he and my mother bought when Courtney was one and Mom was pregnant with me. After they split up, she’d wanted to sell, but he paid her for half and preserved it, a little museum of our family-no-longer. The interior had been rehabbed from time to time—furniture had been rearranged or replaced or divvied up, rooms repainted, a wall between the kitchen and family room knocked down—but the changes had been gradual, so that it felt like the same house it had always been, though a little smaller and emptier every time. It was the house my parents had brought me home to, when I was just a wailing bald thing in a thin blanket, and the house I had left behind when I left, long-haired and pimply, for college, and the house that awaited every time I came back to visit. Not the largest or the most elegant house on the street, but a stalwart painted-brick three-story house with black shutters and squared-off columns on either side of the porch. And do they have a technical term for the kind of memory that flared during the walk I took from the driveway, along the path by the shrubbery and up the porch stairs? I mean the series of trivial recognitions—there is the concrete step, there are the porch planks, there is the brass doorknob, there is my outline in the storm door—that sum to something greater than the parts, an “Ah!” of wistfulness and dread.
Dad took advantage of my little trance and grabbed my suitcase, then started to heft it inside. I reached for it, and at first he didn’t want to let go.
“I can lift a damn suitcase,” he muttered, but he let me take it from him. He opened the front door and I hauled it straight up to the second floor and parked it just outside my old bedroom. I heard someone whisper “Fuck, fuck, fuck”—it was me saying it. Then I went back downstairs, still winded (no, I was not in the best shape) and suddenly at a loss for how I would occupy myself for even one day in D.C., even the half a day that was left.
The house was too cluttered and too empty. When she’d moved out, Mom had taken some of the furniture but not the boxes of videos, the board games, the paint-spattered screwdrivers, and Dad instead of getting rid of the stuff had hunkered down. Everywhere I looked I saw artifacts of our lost civilization, pot holders we’d made at summer camp, bicentennial coasters printed with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, old headphones, a cracked lazy Susan that Dad had recently dug out and superglued. He was the museum’s custodian—he kept it all up.
I tried to tell Dad about the soldiers in the airport, but what was my point? I didn’t know.
“It’s good that they let them board first,” he said. “Do you want coffee?” I’m all right, I told him. “A beer?” It was not quite noon. I said no. He was still wearing his jacket, and he took his phone from one of the pockets. Slowly he pressed some buttons, which seemed too small for his big fingers, and then brought the device to his face. “Hi there,” he said. “Helen’s here.”
Whenever I came to town he took great pleasure in informing the other members of our family that I’d arrived. It was Courtney he’d called, and I knew that after the call ended he’d likewise inform me about whatever task my sister was completing at work, probably a transparent excuse she’d used to get off the phone—“she’s doing her expenses.” Both our parents would tell my sisters and me these kinds of basic facts about the other two, as though telling us about people we didn’t know well. In fact we knew one another so much better than our parents knew us that it was almost unfair, and at times it even seemed to me that when my dad reported my presence in D.C. to Courtney, or when he told me about her work, he was unconsciously asking us to give him something in return, some of our deeper knowledge. But we would never betray it, no matter how mad we sometimes were at one another, for it wasn’t even something we could express in the language he spoke.
That night we went out to dinner with Courtney and Hugo. They swung by the house, and we took their car to the restaurant. Hugo, ceding the passenger seat to Dad, joined me in back—my brother-in-law and I were the kids in this group, and not just because of where we were sitting. I heard my sister and father cut in and out, their voices mingling with the radio’s voices.
My sister got louder and asked, as though refuting a point he’d just made, “But how’ve you been feeling?” He said he was feeling well, thank you, and she asked whether he’d been taking all his pills. She said that I should double-check that he was taking them. “Helen, do you know where his pill box is?”
I pretended not to hear, scanning the Connecticut Avenue awnings for new additions. Every second or third time I came home, a new bistro or bakery would have popped up, replacing an older bistro or bakery, or else rising up from the ashes of some defunct repair shop, one of the businesses that used to exist around there, shops where the owner fixed lamps or vacuum cleaners, or would sell you one he’d already fixed. Now it was mostly upscale food. People threw broken lamps and vacuums in the garbage.
“Helen?”
Courtney had tied a soft, expensive-looking scarf around her neck, and her hair, falling over the folds of the scarf, looked expensive too. Her hips seemed wider than last time I’d seen her, I noticed after we got out of the car, and they shifted mechanically as she walked, like big wooden gears. I wondered whether she was having an affair. Recently on the phone she’d mentioned a man she worked with, mentioned him more than once, for no other reason than to relate some opinion or anecdote he’d shared with her. So I was looking for signs, a telltale glossiness, a coiled spring in her step.
She did strike me as chattier than usual. As we entered the restaurant she was cataloging for my benefit the chef’s lineage, listing all the places he’d worked before this one, and at the same time she was surveying the dining room for people she knew, until at last she lit on a middle-aged couple—but no, I realized as she waved to them, they were my own age, only dressed like older people. They were precociously stodgy, but also perky, in that Washington way.
It wasn’t like L.A. lacked for ambitious preeners, but this city had its own brand of them, I thought, people who glowed with purpose and intramural knowledge, glowed with wonkish visibility itself, as though they were headed to or had just come from a guest spot on a political talk show. We sat down, and Courtney told me their names and the place where each one worked, which might have been law firms or consulting firms or some other kind of firms, who the hell knew.
My sister herself was the deputy director of an environmental nonprofit. Her job was to raise money from wealthy people and foundations, the same thing our mother had done for much of her career. The work didn’t really suit Courtney, in that she hated to ask people for anything, but she hoped eventually to become executive director, if not there then someplace else.
“What do you guys usually get here?” I asked Hugo.
“It’s all very good.”
“Not all of it—remember that time the risotto wasn’t hot?” Courtney said.
“Oh yes. You sent it back to the kitchen.” Hugo was from Mexico City originally, and his English was more careful than a native speaker’s.
“This man would never send anything back. He thinks it’s rude. But I mean, it was not hot.”
Dad’s face, as he listened to her, seemed to become broader and livelier, full of an appreciation she’d never had to earn.
“Risotto’s not supposed to be piping hot, is it?” I asked.
“Of course it’s supposed to be hot.”
“I just feel like I’ve had it when it’s not all that hot.”
“It was, like, cold. They took it off the bill.”