He shook his head no.
“But I don’t want to leave you,” I said.
“College is important.”
“Well I won’t go to school in New York. Not after what happened there.”
I didn’t say, Not after what happened there today. I thought, Not after what happened there to Jeanne.
•
One afternoon, I was in a computer room at the high school, editing the newspaper. As my advisor leaned next to me and stared at the computer screen, he put his hand on my thigh. His hand felt oddly heavy, looked absurdly white against my tan legs.
“I like it,” he said, pointing—with his other hand—at a new font I’d chosen.
The hand on my thigh moved higher and higher. I was wearing shorts.
“What do you think?” he said.
When the hand moved between my legs, I stood.
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said.
I left, washed my face with cold water. I told myself that what happened hadn’t happened, or hadn’t happened enough to be discussed.
•
I asked my mom if I could spend the rest of the school year at home.
“I want to be here with Dad,” I said.
“Something else is wrong,” she said.
I hesitated. I was surrounded by photographs of myself. Our downstairs looked like a shrine to me. If my dad learned about my advisor, would he regret having let me transfer out of the Catholic school? Would he be mad at me for hiding this from him?
“You can’t tell Dad.”
“Tell him what?” she said.
I told her, and she left the room.
“Don’t,” I insisted.
But there he was, in his blue pajama pants and gray sweatshirt, what he often wore those days. She helped him sit in the chair across from me. His cane was propped against it.
“Tell your father,” she said.
I avoided his eyes.
“It’s a teacher,” I told him.
My dad’s hand clenched his cane.
“What did he do?” he asked.
I began to cry.
“He touched her,” my mom said.
My teacher touching me was less important than my dad hearing that my teacher touched me.
“If only I were well enough,” my dad told the floor.
•
The principal looked at my mom, then at me. I could feel the hot tears. The principal closed the door. My mom sat beside me.
“Tell him,” my mom said.
I tried to give examples—my advisor’s tone of voice, the expression in his eyes, the invitations to his place, but when said aloud, the details sounded inconsequential.
“He touched her,” my mom said. “If my husband were in better health, that teacher would be under a fresh sidewalk.”
The principal said he believed me. He assured me of it.
The detectives did not.
They met with me several times.
They said I looked tired. I said I had trouble sleeping. They asked if I thought my ability to reason had been compromised by a lack of sleep.
•
I read my acceptance letter—from the university I most wanted to attend. A six-hour drive away, right outside Chicago, it offered me almost a full ride and by the last month of high school, I had college entirely paid for through scholarships and grants. My parents wouldn’t have to sell the house.
“Tuition, books, living expenses, everything,” I told them.
My dad squeezed my hand.
“You,” he said, smiling.
“She got the brains from you,” my mom said.
I soon learned that my advisor also would be leaving town. A school elsewhere in Ohio had offered him a position. There wasn’t enough proof to take away his teaching license.
“I’m sorry,” my principal said. “It’s the best I could do.”
•
My dad tried to renew his driver’s license the last year of his life. My mom told me the story.
The woman at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles asked him how tall he was as she measured him. He straightened his back as best he could.
“Five feet, ten inches,” he answered.
By then he was my height, five feet, six inches. The woman looked at my mom and smiled.
“You’re exactly right,” the woman told him.
My dad smiled for the camera. He was wearing his glasses and a blue dress shirt. His narrowed eyes and the cheek shadows bore a down-dragging gravity. The printed ID listed his height as five feet, ten inches. Below that an image of the state flag appeared. Overlapping the flag: NONDRIVER.
The woman told him he could sit while she printed it.
“It won’t take long,” she said.
He held my mom’s hand while they waited.
When it was done, the woman handed him the card.
“I can drive then?” my dad asked.
She looked at my mom. My mom nodded yes.
“You’re all set,” the woman said.
He thanked her, and then, to my mom: “Maybe you should drive us home.”
•
The day of my high school graduation, my mom gently told me my dad would stay home.
“It’s too hot outside,” she explained. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea.”
“Then I don’t want to go,” I told her.
“No,” my dad said. “This is an important day.”
He watched me accept my diploma on the public access channel.
After the ceremony, at home, I again proposed staying in town for another year.
He shook his head no.
“I want to be with you,” I said.
“This is what he wants,” my mom said.
The day I left town, I told him that I wanted to stay.
“Tell me not to leave,” I told him.
He squeezed my hand and said nothing.
SEVEN
Here, above my desk, hang four black-and-white photos of my dad as a young man in New York. His thick dark hair is brushed back, a slight wave to it. He is thin with large dark eyes, a wide smile, and a strong jaw.
“He looks like a movie star in these pictures,” I tell my mom.
“You have his eyes,” she says. “You look like him.”
In every photo he wears a tie and slacks, which seem almost absurd against the modest scenery: dry overgrown grass, an A-frame house, a rope swing with two crude wooden seats. Two of the photos he dated July 6, 1945 (I recognize his perfect cursive), a day that, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, was foggy with light rain and thunder. But the sky looks clear, or as clear as a black-and-white photo allows. In a year his mother, Josephine, would die in her sleep at fifty-four of gout, and Jeanne would be born. He smiled that July day with his arms around his two sisters, Anna and Mary, in their floral aprons. And in the other dated photo, his mother stands in a pale button-down collared dress between him and Anna’s husband, Tony. Mary, Anna, and Tony visited us when I was a child, but they never mentioned my dad’s life before me. His brother, Frank, and their father aren’t photographed.
“Frank was shy,” my mom says. “He and your dad were very close, but your dad and his father had a difficult relationship.”
The undated photos remain more mysterious. In one he kneels on the grass with a small mutt between his hands, and in the other photo he kneels between a boy and girl in denim overalls on rope swings. Who are those children? What was the name of that mutt? I asked him once and now I forget.
What if I look at Jeanne as an illness? As a diagnosis? Does that sound bad?
As bad as calling her a narrative device? As bad as calling her a metaphor?
Metaphors. I should make a list of metaphors because metaphors reveal complicated emotions. I once kept a journal where underneath each date was a metaphor. I never actually detailed what happened. I simply made up metaphors that encapsulated my general impressions/feelings about a particular occurrence. For example: an overturned boat kept
appearing in entries dated April 2003. May was unlit windows. My dad would have turned eighty-one years old. He’d have turned six months dead.
DAD
The first day of my sociology class, the professor distributed an anonymous survey to the students. Most of my classes were fifteen students. This class, however, was the largest on campus, six hundred students. One of my journalism classmates sat next to me in the lecture hall. I still remember her. Her father practiced law in Chicago. She wanted to edit a fashion magazine. She rotated her designer bags on a daily schedule. One question asked us to circle our family’s annual income. I circled “less than $20,000.”
“Do you not have a family?” she asked loudly.
Faces in the large lecture hall turned to look. I slunk down in my seat.
After class, she asked how I was there.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you on a scholarship or something?”
“Yes.”
“Are your parents alive?”
“Yes,” I said, unable to look her in the eyes.
•
One Friday night, less than a month after I started college, I went with my roommate to visit her parents’ home in Chicago. For whatever reason, I left my cell phone on my bed.
On the drive back to campus on Sunday, I looked out the car window and noticed two women who looked identical to my mom and her friend Sharon. Homesick, I told myself. You miss your parents. My roommate dropped me off at our dorm, and she went to her boyfriend’s dorm. When I went into our room, my phone was blinking. I knew. I threw on my sneakers and ran toward where I’d seen my mom and Sharon. As I ran, I pressed the phone against my ear, listening to the messages.
“I’m on my way to you,” my mom said in the first message.
Next message: “Where are you? They won’t let me into your dorm.”
Next message: “Jeannie, call me as soon as you get this.”
She knew that I spent most of my time at the library, so I ran there, and found her and Sharon, their backs facing me, underneath a tree. I stopped running.
“Where’s Dad?” I said.
My mom turned and hugged me. She said he was at home, and hospice was caring for him. Someone was caring for him, my thinking went, which meant he’d be fine.
As we walked back toward my dorm, she explained that she’d tried to find me there, but the student in the mail room had refused to let her in.
“Did you tell him about Dad?”
Even though she told him that my dad was dying, that she’d driven six hours in the middle of the night to tell me in person, and that she couldn’t reach me on my phone, the student said letting her into the hallway would violate university rules.
I ignored the word “dying.” Or maybe she never used it. Maybe she said “not well.” Maybe she said “very sick.” Maybe, like me, she was in denial.
When we reached my dorm, I told her to wait in the car with Sharon. I avoided looking at the mail room, went into my room and packed, then decided to deal with the student.
I reached my right arm through the open mail room window and gripped his neck. I remembered my dad reaching his arm through the driver’s open window.
“You’d be worth getting expelled for,” I said.
The student looked surprised, then frightened.
“Do you remember a blonde woman who came in here looking for her daughter?”
The student nodded.
“Do you want to guess who I am?”
Right then a woman with a white sweater tied around her shoulders walked by with presumably her husband and their son, another resident in my dorm. It was parents’ weekend.
“Everyone here is just so friendly,” she said.
Then she registered the scene.
“Oh. We should—”
Her voice dropped off. I loosened my grip.
“From now on, if you see me,” I said, “I want you to look away. I want to forget you exist.”
I walked outside with my bags. The air was fresh, the sky was clear, but my dad was dying.
•
When he began dying, men built a wall around his dying. They installed a door. My mom said this was for his privacy.
He was dying in what used to be the living room.
He was dying between the silver rails of a borrowed bed.
He was dying.
I fell to my knees and pressed my head into the carpet.
“No, no, no,” I repeated.
I stood and squeezed my dad’s hands.
“I didn’t know, Dad. Please know that. I didn’t know.”
•
A hospice nurse introduced herself. I remember she wore her glasses on a ribbon. They hung half-mast against her chest.
She demonstrated how to administer the morphine, how to turn him.
“He needs to be turned over every few hours. Otherwise he’ll develop bedsores.”
She showed me his bedpan.
“We’ll do most of this,” she explained, “but there may be times you’ll have to do this.”
“The morphine?” I asked.
She touched me lightly on the shoulder.
“Don’t you worry,” she said. “You’ll have a lot of help.”
MOM
“Did your dad say anything to you,” my mom asks, “when you came home from college?”
“It seemed like it hurt him to speak,” I tell her. “He mostly squeezed my hand. Why?”
“He was very angry with me for calling you.”
“He didn’t want me there?”
“It was a matter of pride. He didn’t want you to see him like that. He told me not to take you away from school. He said to wait to call you until he was buried. I told him, ‘Terry, I can’t do that.’ He didn’t want me to call his other daughters either, but Sharon told him, ‘Terry, your other girls could come after Barb for not calling. They could blame her.’ He said, ‘Call them.’ I hated going against him. But I didn’t think it’d be right otherwise. After I brought you home, he gave me a look. He was mad at me, I think.”
He didn’t want to see me; or rather, he didn’t want me to see him like that. I try to understand. I need to understand.
“I’m sure he understood,” I say.
•
When my mom called his other daughters to tell them he was dying, did she say “dying”? Maybe she said “dying.” “Close to the end,” maybe? I told myself he wasn’t dying.
When they arrived with their dark hair and dark eyes and dark clothes, they looked strikingly sophisticated. One of them held a box of chocolates.
“He can’t eat them, can he?” she asked me nervously.
I took her to be Carol.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Is he?” she began.
“He might be able to eat them,” I said. “Let’s hold on to them.”
Them, him. I meant hold on to him.
DAD
I sat by the railroad tracks and watched a freight train rush by.
I circled the block.
I circled the block some more.
I’d left the house to give his other daughters time alone with him. I remember looking at my watch. I forget how much time had passed, if it seemed like the right amount of time, not enough time, too much time.
I meandered downtown, to the lakefront where my parents and I fed seagulls when I was a child. Roller coasters rose like soft cursive in the gray distance.
I walked home.
When I opened the front door, Debbie was trimming his hair in the kitchen. A blue bath towel was draped around his shoulders. His head was bent over our green-and-white checkered tablecloth. Arlene photographed the scene, among other scenes from their visit, and later mailed me the photos. Only now do I see how old he was: his olive coloring had been wrung out of his face—much thinner than I remember—and his shoulders were gently stooped forward.
But back then I didn’t notice. He didn’t look old, not to me.
He s
imply looked like my dad.
•
Somehow the subject of his name arose.
“Terry is your name,” one of his daughters told him; which one, I forget.
“Giovanni is his name,” I said. “He goes by Terry.”
They looked at one another.
He nodded.
“His father’s barbershop was called Terry’s Barbershop when he bought it,” I said. “Rather than change the sign, his father changed his own name from Giovanni to Terry. If a form required him to give a middle name, he wrote ‘John.’ He thought an American name would help business. So then Dad started getting called Terry.”
Surely they knew stories unfamiliar to me.
That evening Carol told me, “You had more time with him than we did.”
•
My mom drove to the grocery store. I went for another aimless walk that was either too long or not long enough. Carol, Arlene, and Debbie stayed behind.
When I returned home, a stranger’s car was parked in the driveway. I ran inside. A man’s voice that wasn’t my dad’s was in my dad’s room. I rushed to his doorway and found his other daughters and a priest holding hands and praying around him. I went to the back porch and sat on the rusted aluminum glider with my dog, Gigi.
“He didn’t want a priest,” I told Gigi. “He said that. No priest.”
My dad was Catholic but he was private.
And yet here he is.
•
Jeanne’s sisters were leaving.
We must have hugged.
Surely we hugged.
I can’t summon an image of us hugging.
•
I quietly read Hamlet beside his bed while he slept.
“He was a man, take him for all in all,” Hamlet says of his dead father. “I shall not look upon his like again.”
My dad squeezed my hand. I squeezed back harder.
My mom put her hands on my shoulders. I followed her into the front room and listened to her explain that I’d need to leave soon.
“Your father wants you back at school,” she said. “You’ve already missed a week of classes.”
“But I want to be here.”
“You can come home on weekends.”
The Glass Eye Page 5