by Leah Carroll
It’s as if I want all this to have happened already. I want the memory of it, but the doing it is hard for me. I don’t know how to talk to Dad anymore, whether to try to be his peer or to reach all the way back and try again to be his daughter. Every answer I give feels not good enough. So I err on the side of caution.
“We could go,” I say, trying to sound noncommittal, and see the look of disappointment flash briefly across his face. He’s disappointed in me, I realize. Disappointed that I can’t just let it all go and have fun, after all the time he has spent planning. Next time, I promise myself, I will say the right thing. I will answer the right way.
At dinner in Georgetown we sit at an outdoor table. I feel drab next to Dad in his immaculate button-down shirt, his silver hair brushed away from his face. Even the veins tracking across his face seem distinguished in the late-day light as he squeezes a lime into his glass of club soda. I order an iced tea, unsweetened, and resist the urge to mix in a packet of sugar.
“I’d like to get pictures of the Wall at sunset,” Dad says. Next to our table is his enormous camera bag, his tripod anchored at the bottom of it with Velcro. “We can do some shopping first. On the way back to the car.”
I nod my head enthusiastically. Am I being too enthusiastic?
“I really like it here,” I say. “Georgetown is really cool.”
We walk past boutiques and coffee shops on the way back. Dad looks over his shoulder at me on the narrow sidewalk. “Do you see someplace you want to stop?”
I shrug, trying not to look too eager. “I mean, this place looks cool,” I say. We’re standing outside a high-end head shop and in the window is a display of necklaces made out of sterling silver, semiprecious stones, and what appear to be delicate bones, all strung together. I think they are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
Inside, I browse through the small section of CDs, and slowly make my way over to the jewelry. I’m not used to asking for things but the necklaces are so pretty, I know I will think about them nonstop after we leave. I pick up one from the felt display case and hold it up to my neck. The little cylinders of bone hold in place a teardrop-shaped piece of turquoise, all filigreed at the edge in sterling silver. The stone hangs perfectly, right in the hollow of my neck. “These are kind of cool,” I say. “Do you think?”
“Sure,” says Dad. “Why don’t you pick out two?”
I hold my breath and try to suppress a smile, thinking of how cool the necklaces are, and how I’ve gotten them, brand-new, in a fancy shop far away from Rhode Island, and how that will always make them special. As the cashier rings them up, Dad and I look at the display of stickers on the wall behind him. I’m giddy with the rush of the purchase, and laugh aloud at the two with black-and-white images, one of older Elvis, and one of young Elvis beneath which are emblazoned the words: I’M DEAD.
“Should I get fat Elvis or skinny Elvis?” asks Dad.
“Fat Elvis,” I say. “It’s awesome.” The cashier slips it into the paper bag with my necklaces. Driving to the Vietnam Wall, I put on the turquoise necklace and look at my reflection in the passenger-side mirror.
“You really like that, don’t you?” asks Dad.
“I love it,” I say, trying to convey how much I really do.
“You know, Leah,” he says, “if you want something from me, it’s okay to just ask.”
I’m quiet because sometimes that’s true and sometimes it isn’t.
We circle the area around the Wall looking unsuccessfully for a parking spot. Finally, Dad drives away from the crowds and into a more industrial part of the city filled mostly with office buildings emptied for the night. He tells me how DC is really two cities—the part the tourists come to see and the part with one of the highest murder rates in the country.
We park the car in front of a meter and walk toward the Wall, Dad’s camera equipment knocking at his legs, though as usual he doesn’t seem to notice. The sun has set but it isn’t yet dark. Magic hour, Dad calls it. It’s the light in which he wants to photograph the Vietnam Memorial, so we trudge past the Lincoln Memorial.
“Should we climb the stairs?” I ask.
Dad surveys the steps, holding out the front of his damp shirt, his face flushed in the heat. “I think it will be there for a while,” he says.
“It’s so hot,” I say.
“Almost there,” Dad says. “I promise it’s worth it.”
When we get to the Vietnam Memorial and descend the angled walkway running parallel to its marble wall, I understood what he means. As we move down the side of the Wall, a hush falls across the area. I reach out and touch the cool polished stone, then, realizing what I’m doing, I pull my hand away.
“It’s okay,” says Dad. “It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s designed that way.”
All around us are large men, many of them in leather vests, tattoos running down their arms. One man with a long gray ponytail traces a name onto a piece of paper and weeps. A man in a suit stands a bit back from the crowd. He looks as if he has just stopped by the monument on his way home from work. Tears spill down his face from behind his sunglasses.
Dad takes photos of the adjacent monument, a statue of three infantrymen looking into the middle distance. He tells me the story of Maya Lin who won the contest to design the Wall and the ensuing fury. How they’d hired a well-known sculptor to create this other statue because they didn’t know if people would “get” Lin’s vision.
“Plus,” says Dad, “she was an Asian woman. But you can see which monument matters more.” We look toward the marble wall, all the people gathered there.
“Is it an anniversary or something?” I ask.
“Leah,” he says, “I’ve been here maybe a dozen times. And I’ve never not seen a grown man crying his eyes out. Big tough guys. Sobbing. It never stops being real for us. This place. It’s really important.” Dad shows me how the names are arranged in chronological order, and how to find a specific person by looking them up in the large tattered books stationed around the wall.
“People wanted the names in alphabetical order, but Maya Lin pointed out you would wind up with, like, twenty-five Kevin Carrolls all in a line. The whole point was that this was personal. It wasn’t that.” He turns around and points at the statue of the infantrymen. “But in this light. What a gorgeous shot that will be.”
I watch Dad think about his shot, about the way the light will play off the intricately molded faces. It’s sad here, but it’s a kind of soaring sadness, and I don’t mind just standing, taking it all in.
When we leave, it’s dark, and we walk through the deserted city center back to the car. Dad walks briskly in front of me, his tripod slung over his shoulder, navigating the city streets. I almost bump into him when he stops in front of a homeless man who leans against a building, panhandling.
“Anything you got, man,” he says and folds his cardboard sign to hold out his hand. Dad puts his tripod down and digs through his pockets. Usually, they’re full of change, piles of it that he pulls out by the fistful and drops into a large vase at the end of the day. And he always gives change to people asking for it on the street. Sometimes, walking through Providence or Boston, we’ll get stopped two and three times and Dad will plunk a fistful of change into an outstretched palm.
Now, with Dad looking down, the man stares at the side of his face and wrinkles his forehead. “Kevin?”
Dad looks up. The two men look each other in the eye for a long silent beat.
“Hey man,” says Dad, holding out his hand. The homeless man slides his hand against his palm, and they lock fingers for a moment before letting go. Dad peels two twenties from the stack of bills in his pocket.
“Thanks, Kev,” says the man and turns to look at me as if he has just noticed I’m there. Dad has started walking away.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“Some guy I was in Vietnam with,” he says.
“Seriously?” I ask. It seems too staged, too unreal.
I have nothing to say in response. I’ve forgotten what it can be like to be with Dad for more than just a couple of hours at a time, the way the universe seems to line up for him in a more dramatic way than it does for the rest of us.
We drive home the next day, stopping in Baltimore to see the Edgar Allan Poe house. Driving down the streets lined with row houses is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. In the abusive heat, everyone stands on their porches or out in the street. Someone has pried open a fire hydrant and children jump through the pulsing water. I didn’t realize that even happened outside the movies. This is a larger collection of black people than I have ever seen in my life. I say that to Dad and he laughs.
“Rhode Island, you know,” he starts, and then is quiet for a moment considering what he wants to say. “Some places it’s really easy to be open-minded. It can be really easy to talk about equality when you go to the Stop and Shop, and it’s filled with other white people.”
We’re driving around, trying to find the Poe house, the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning pumping. Dad says, “We’ll just have to ask someone,” and before I protest he rolls down my window and I’m staring up at a tall black woman in a bright-pink tank top.
“Um,” I say.
The woman rolls her eyes and before I can even ask, she says, “Poe house is that way. Down this street, take a right.”
When we get there, we’re surprised to see that the house is in the middle of a residential block, a narrow row house just like the others, except that this one has a sign affixed to the door. It’s closed because of the heat. Unsafe conditions.
“What about all the people who live in the houses around here?” I ask.
Instead we go to Poe’s grave in a tiny church cemetery surrounded on all sides by busy city streets. Cars roll past, the windows down and music pouring from them into the thick air.
“Look,” I say to Dad, showing him the dates on Poe’s grave. “He died on October seventh. My birthday.” I’m sure it means something. Dad smiles at me in a way that’s so rare, I practically glow when it happens. I’m sure he doesn’t realize it looks different, but it does; it’s slower, less self-aware. I never know what I’ve done to deserve it.
ELEVEN
It takes a while to sink in that I’m not headed for college. I suppose I’d thought all along that somewhere along the line my inherent genius would be acknowledged despite the fact that the only classes I’d made passing grades in during my junior year were health and ceramics. I’d talked to Dad on the car ride home from Washington, DC, about maybe going to the New England School of Photography. It’s your portfolio that counts there, not your grades. But we never follow up and when school starts in September, my guidance counselor calls me into her office.
“You realize you don’t have enough credits to graduate, right?” she asks me. “I think you are probably a smart girl, Leah. What will you do?”
I look down at my hands folded in the lap of my corduroy skirt. Why is she asking me? I have no idea what you do if it’s not getting up most days for high school. I have no idea what the next step is.
“That outfit!” says the guidance counselor. “See how creative you are? Did you make it yourself? Let me see up close!”
I lift my foot so she can see where I’ve cut off the ruffled hem of an old nightgown and sewn it into the bottom of the skirt.
“Have you ever thought of being a fashion designer?”
I blushed and roll my eyes. I’ve never thought of being a fashion designer. I love making clothes and coming up with the patterns in my head but as much as I protest otherwise, if I had money to go to the mall, that is where I would have bought my clothes instead. I leave the office finally understanding that there is no way I will graduate from high school that year. I can either take a fifth year or get my GED. I shudder at the thought of a fifth year, a second-year senior. It means disrupting the natural order of things. Four years and then college. That’s how it works.
I keep the information to myself and don’t do anything about it. I still get up most days and go to school, though more and more I have Ann-Marie call in sick for me. I write long poems during science class, sneak out for iced coffee during my remedial accounting class, and stare blankly out the window during European history, snapping to attention only as everyone begins gathering their backpacks and moving on to the next class.
My relationship with Ann-Marie is not going well. She’s started dating a man who owns a fashionable salon in Barrington, and is smitten. With his children grown, he has little interest in befriending her two sullen teenagers, one of them an accident of marriage. One night while Ann-Marie is at her boyfriend’s, I’m watching Taylor, and she tells me in her tiny doll voice all the things she has done with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend and how she hopes that he might be her daddy one day.
“You have a daddy,” I tell her. I’m perched on the edge of the tub, filling the rust-stained porcelain with warm water for Taylor’s bath. “And he loves you very much.”
Taylor balances herself and gingerly lifts a chubby leg over the side and into the water. Once she’s situated herself in a pile of bubbles she looks up at me. “Mommy says that Daddy loves me very much. But that he is very sick.”
The last time my dad had taken Taylor out alone she’d come home with a Barbie car he’d clearly managed to rip the security tag off and walk off without paying for. Ann-Marie was furious and I wondered if it was the first time she knew that Dad shoplifted. I’d seen him do it hundreds of times, even when they were still married. He’d pay for a basket full of groceries and then slide a box of razors into his pants while the clerk counted his money.
“Daddy’s not sick,” I say.
“Mommy says that Daddy is sick in his brain and his heart.” When I don’t say anything she continues. “Mommy says that you and Derek are lazy, too. Mommy says I am the best girl.”
I splash water at Taylor and try to smile. “I don’t want to hear anything else Mommy said, okay?”
IN DECEMBER, OUR increasing tension explodes in a huge argument in the kitchen of the apartment. We lob insults back and forth at each other until finally I sneer, “Well at least I’m not a slut.” Ann-Marie goes from angry to furious, chasing me into the corner between the refrigerator and the front door, smacking at me with both palms as I hold my hands over my head.
“I’m calling your father,” she screams after me as I run into my bedroom and shut the door. “If you don’t appreciate me you can go live with him.”
Dad pulls up in front of the house a few hours later. I shiver inside my patchy faux-fur coat and wait in his car while he and Ann-Marie talk on the front porch. He walks down the steps, gets into the car, starts the engine, and sighs deeply. “Are you hungry?” he asks.
We eat at Caserta’s Pizza near his apartment. We order our pizza and as we sit down in one of the orange booths waiting for our number to be called, Dad pours a bottle of Miller Lite into a plastic cup. “If this is going to work,” he says, “we’ll have to be more honest with each other. So I’m going to have a beer. And you’re not going to freak out.”
For so many years Dad has done his drinking sneakily. He has always preferred to drink in bars where he is the life of the party, the regular everyone loves. But as time went on he’d started drinking surreptitiously in the house, sneaking sips of whiskey from hidden bottles. I don’t think I’ve seen him casually drink a beer since I was a child. But I promise him I won’t freak out.
“If what’s going to work out?” I ask.
Dad wipes foam from his mustache. I notice that the silver of his beard looks almost yellow in some places. “If we’re going to live together,” he says. “You really fucked up this time, you kn
ow. She doesn’t want you back.”
For all of my problems with Ann-Marie I can’t imagine leaving Barrington, and I never thought she would kick me out for good. I launch into a tirade about how selfish she is, about how all she cares about is her stupid hairdresser boyfriend, about how she says mean things about me to Taylor. By the time I’m done, our pizza is ready and Dad carries it to the table.
“She’s a good woman. I really wanted to love her,” he says. “But in the end I think I married her so you could have a mom. I thought if I married her you’d have a normal family. Didn’t work out so well, I guess.”
When we get to Dad’s apartment it’s past eleven and I’m exhausted. He lives on the fourth floor of an old Victorian house in a one-bedroom with sloped ceilings and a kitchen alcove. The space itself had been renovated fairly recently with nice gray carpet and fresh white paint. It’s furnished with the remnants of our small house on Carpenter Avenue—the white leather love seat that matches the sofa Ann-Marie had taken to the apartment, the brass headboard from their old bedroom, the glass coffee table that had sat in the upstairs living room after the basement of our old house was furnished. It’s tidy but smells off, as if it has never been scrubbed. The coffee table is covered in sticky ringlets from bottles and glasses, and Dad’s gray hairs cling to every surface in the bathroom.
“The futon is pretty comfortable,” says Dad. “I fall asleep out here a lot of nights.” He gives me a pillow and the comforter from his bed and shows me how his remote control works and then goes in his room and shuts the door. Within minutes, I hear him snoring. I lie awake in front of the TV watching a marathon of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Finally at two a.m., still awake, I turn on the light and wander around the apartment.