Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  That wouldn’t have worked when I was a kid, so I knew it wouldn’t work now, at least not for the long term. I did the best I could to “snap to it,” but soon it was clear that Dad had concerns.

  “Did you find the shower okay?”

  “If you don’t want to use the bathroom near your room, feel free to use mine.”

  “There’s shampoo in the linen closet in my bathroom along with extra toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap in case you need any.”

  “How about you comb your hair and put on some lipstick? Then I’ll drive you to the beach. We’ll look at the ocean. It’s relaxing. We can stop at Dumser’s for a cone.”

  A bridge didn’t have to fall on me. Soon I was waking up no later than 7:00 A.M., often earlier, getting dressed, making my bed, and having coffee with him each morning while he channel surfed between his favorite morning shows or what I refer to as America’s outposts of ultraconservative propaganda. After listening to the talking heads criticize everything about women like me—from our value systems to how we looked and dressed rather than the principles and merit of what we believed—I couldn’t help myself. Yes, I sank to their level.

  “Wow, Dad! Look at that! Another white, blonde woman sandwiched between two white men on that couch. She sure is perky. But don’t you think that dress is a little inappropriate?”

  “It’s fine. I like it.” He tries not to rise to the bait. “Besides, this is show business.”

  “Exactly,” I say snidely.

  “They’re going outside to talk to real people on the street,” he informs me.

  “I bet she’ll be cold in that dress.”

  “You know … you sound an awful lot like your mother.” Standing up, he looks at me.

  Did I go too far?

  “Here.” He tosses the remote to me. “Go watch your commie show. I’m leaving anyway.” My commie show was ABC’s Good Morning America.

  Our mealtimes were out of synch too. While I flipped back and forth between forgetting to eat for two days and wandering absentmindedly through the kitchen opening cabinets and the refrigerator searching for something to graze on, my father ate on a schedule. Breakfast took place sometime between 7:00 and 7:30, lunch sometime between 12:00 and 12:30 and dinner at 4:30 P.M. I thought serving dinner at 7:00 P.M. was a fair compromise, given I might eat as late as 9:00 or 10 P.M., until one night the poor man nearly fainted from hunger. We compromised. Dinner would be served no later than 5:30 P.M.

  When it came to menus, I soon learned to follow one of my father’s favorite rules: KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

  “How do you like your dinner, Dad?” I asked one night after throwing together a simple little quinoa salad with marinated chicken breast, dried cranberries, avocado, and feta cheese.

  “It’s … very interesting … uh, but tasty,” he replied with the diplomacy of a State Department official while analyzing something on his fork.

  “What is this?” he asked while studying a green glob of avocado covered with random quinoa grains.

  “I’m glad you like it. Shall I make it again sometime?”

  “No, that’s okay,” he said. “There is no need for you to work so hard.”

  I laughed and told him that my second husband would say, after trying one of my new recipes, “We should have that again,” if he liked it. If he didn’t, he’d just say, “Thank you.”

  We now stick to meat, potato or rice, and a tossed salad or vegetable combos most nights, though he likes the random Chinese, Italian, and German meals I make too. I am lucky enough to remember some of the recipes Mom and I learned while we were stationed overseas. Menu development continues to be a work in progress. And, God bless him, he’s game for trying almost anything at least once. As he says, “I was in the Army. I can eat anything.”

  After moving into Dad’s house, I looked for things to do that would help me feel as though I was pulling my weight, since it was clear he didn’t really need me. Most weekdays my father played golf with the FOGs. The FOGs are a group of men Dad met at the golf club. The way he tells it, he thought there needed to be a system and organization for all the retired guys who showed up at the golf club each morning to tee off, so he did that and gave them a name. FOG stands for F-ing Old Guy. When they don’t play golf, they go to breakfast. Sometimes they go to the casino where they use their points for free pizza.

  Dad reserved Wednesdays for chores and personal business. He paid bills, scheduled and attended appointments with dentists and doctors, shopped, and took the trash to the local waste transfer station (county dump).

  I did what came naturally. When I was not working, I took over the grocery shopping, cooked our meals, including having his lunch prepared for him when he came home from golf, did laundry, vacuumed, dusted, gardened, and, on Saturdays, I worked with him to polish any silver and brass that needed it. On Sundays, we’d go for a ride as we’d done as a family when I was a child, often grabbing lunch or dinner.

  Eventually, I assimilated well enough to know what chores needed doing on what days, and adapted my work hours to fit Dad’s schedule. I would fall, exhausted, out of the workweek into weekends for a little R&R. But I was still not feeling at home, and I felt far from rested or relaxed. I wanted to know I was contributing enough. I didn’t talk to Dad about how I was feeling. It bothered me that I still didn’t feel as though I belonged in my own father’s home. Dad’s reassurances did not console me.

  When I apologized for not getting something done because of a crisis at work or some other reason, he would say, “Don’t worry about anything. I want you to relax. The world won’t end because the laundry doesn’t get done.”

  After more than six months (the magical amount of time it had always taken for me to get used to a new locale, home, school, or job after years of moving), I still felt out of place. I panicked a little. This was not going to be a short tour. I would not be packing up again in eighteen months, leaving behind my baggage, taking only what I wanted to take with me, and starting over as I had my whole life. I was here for the duration, and I wanted to be. I knew I needed to figure out the reasons for my discomfort. It was my problem, not his, and I knew it was my responsibility to find the solution.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tea and Toast

  ONE AFTERNOON after getting somewhat established at Dad’s house, I wandered down the back staircase from the room where I conducted business to grab a cup of tea. “Tea at three” most afternoons had been a ritual for me since I was three or four while my mother and I lived with my father’s parents during the time Dad was stationed in Korea.

  That he and Mom had had tea each day didn’t surprise me … As I walked away from my desk, I surveyed what had been until recently my father’s “music room.” Here he housed all his albums, tapes, and CDs, and the various types of equipment necessary to play them on. He even had antique gramophones. I winced a bit knowing that I’d displaced him from one of his favorite spots in the house. I knew how he loved listening to music and the enjoyment he got from fiddling with his audio equipment.

  Once in the kitchen, I put the kettle on and headed to the cabinet to decide what type of tea I’d have. I heard the television on in the den. I found Dad, as usual, watching a baseball game. As I came in, he muted the sound.

  “Sorry to disturb your game, Dad. I’m having a cup of tea and just wanted to know if you’d like one, too.”

  “That would be nice,” he said. Then he added, “Your mother and I had tea every afternoon, you know.”

  That Mom and he had tea each day didn’t surprise me. The fact that he’d shared that with me did, and I was pleased.

  I told him that I loved tea breaks too.

  “Your mother got me started on tea,” I said, and told him how every afternoon Grandma sat down for tea at the kitchen table after a day of grocery shopping, housecleaning, taking care of her father, Pop, and me when mom wasn’t there.

  “After tea, that’s when she’d start Grandpa’s dinner.” My grandfather worked
the night shift as a typesetter.

  “She always made me a cup of tea, too. Half tea, half milk, a lump of sugar.”

  Dad nodded.

  “Cambridge tea, Nana called it,” he said.

  I told him that I knew it was also called “cambric tea” or “milk tea” by some.

  “At Grandma’s, there were always cookies with tea. I remember Lorna Doones, ladyfingers, and Vienna Fingers. Do you know that for years I thought that was what was meant by the term finger foods?”

  We laughed and I headed back to the kitchen to get the tea ready. I offered him a selection of teas I brought with me.

  “No. Lipton’s is fine,” he said. “Just a little half and half. No sugar.”

  From then on, “tea at three” became a shared and permanent part of the order of our days together. It started casually.

  Each day I would come down, put the kettle on and go to the den to check on him.

  “Tea, Dad?”

  He always said, “Oh, is it that time? Yes. That would be nice.”

  Then I would select two mismatched mugs from the collection my parents amassed over their marriage and many moves, which I’d found hidden in a cabinet in the kitchen. While the tea steeped (exactly three minutes), I put a few cookies on a plate before I carried it in to him.

  After taking his first sip, he always said, “This is good. Thank you, hon.” Then he would sit back in his recliner and seem to relax.

  Our first conversations over tea were light. I asked him how he and the FOGs had fared on the fairway that morning. He asked me how things were going “at the office.” Sometimes something would occur to him about my mother, his childhood, or his experience as a soldier. I not only listened, I asked questions.

  One day I came down to find two porcelain mugs I didn’t recognize on the counter.

  “Dad, are you ready for your tea?” I asked from the kitchen.

  “Yes,” he said. “Did you see the mugs I put on the counter?”

  He walked into the kitchen and held up one of the mugs. He pointed out that they were porcelain and he had dessert plates to go with them.

  “Your mother really liked this pattern. We used to have our tea in them all the time.”

  “Would you like your tea in these from now on?” I asked him.

  “That would be nice,” he said.

  While the water boiled and he waited in his den, I searched for the dessert plates. I found them in a stack, hidden behind a myriad of other teacups, saucers, and dessert plates in the dining room hutch. I pulled out two of the plates and used them for the treats that day and every afternoon after.

  While preparing tea one afternoon, I realized that there were no treats. The week had gotten away from me and I hadn’t been shopping. In a bit of a panic, I couldn’t find anything sweet to accompany the tea and there was no time to bake anything that late in the day or in the fifteen minutes I allowed myself for a break on workdays. Then I thought of something my grandmother and mother made for me from time to time while I was growing up.

  “Dad, we’re out of cookies and cake, so I made you cinnamon toast to go with your tea. I hope that’s okay.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, and we sat quietly. He smiled. “Your mother and I used to have tea and toast every afternoon after work when we were courting.”

  “Courting, Dad? Really?”

  “Yes. Under the 15th Street Bridge.”

  “The 15th Street Bridge?” I was not sure what he meant.

  “The Kings Highway Station in Brooklyn. There was a platform there above the station. They called it the 15th Street Bridge. We’d meet after work on Wall Street and ride back to Brooklyn on the subway. As you walked down the stairs, on the right there was a little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. We’d order tea and split an order of toast. It was all we could afford. Then we’d both go to our own homes.”

  “Was it crowded after work?” I imagined the mobbed scenes of Brooklyn subways I’d seen in photos and films.

  “No. Most people went straight home. Or some, like your mother’s father and your Uncle Jack, would stop in at the American Inn, the bar next door to the station.”

  “How many tables could they fit in such a small space under the station, Dad?” I asked, my mind automatically starting to formulate a business plan for a coffee shop that could expect times during each day when the number of commuters was light and others when there was not enough space to serve a rush-hour crowd. How would turning people away have affected business?

  “Oh, they had a counter. We sat there.” He looked at me with a sly grin. “So we could touch knees and talk. And just look at one another.”

  I tried to remain expressionless. I didn’t want him to stop, yet I was a bit uncomfortable thinking about my parents, goofy-eyed, in puppy love.

  My father was sharing information I’d never heard. My mother had talked to me about where they met, their courtship, and their early years of marriage, but these were brief conversations, and she didn’t go into much depth. She would share a little bit, then laugh. Sometimes, she’d frown, then move to some other topic.

  Where my mother seemed to try hard not to romanticize their relationship, Dad did not. His version of their story and the way he told it was so loving. When Mom spoke of that time, she did not reveal how much she loved him or whether she knew how much he loved her. Her telling was almost a recitation. “We bumped into each other at the subway one morning on the way to work. We dated. We got engaged. One day he up and enlisted in the Army without telling me. The rest is history.” And a painful history, I would come to realize.

  I knew that my parents dated briefly during high school. They attended James Madison High School. My mother did tell me, but late in life, that early in her freshman year, she’d seen this very handsome boy in the hall wearing a hideous green letter jacket from another school.

  My father laughed when I told him what she’d said. “Oh, yes. It was my Saint Brendan’s jacket. And she followed me. She wanted to see where I was going.”

  “Where were you going?” I asked him.

  “To the principal’s office,” he said sheepishly.

  Dad said that he was a sophomore when he met Mom. He’d transferred to Madison from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit high school where athletics and demanding scholastics were too much for him. I was the one who told him that his oldest brother, Bill, had paid his tuition to go to Brooklyn Prep. He did not know that.

  “I got no support at home. My father and mother never finished high school. There was no sense of how important education was in my home. People were always coming and going. I couldn’t study in my room, at the kitchen or dining room tables. There was no one who pushed me academically. So I transferred.”

  After dating for a year, Mom and Dad split up. No real reason, they just drifted apart. She was busy with school and a part-time job at the public library in Sheepshead Bay. He devoted his time to playing baseball and basketball.

  “Someone asked me once if I knew your mother. ‘You two dated once, right?’ And I told him, ‘Yes, and she is the nicest girl I ever dated.’ That got back to her. She liked that.”

  “So how did you two get back together?”

  “I saw her one day at the train station. And I walked up to her and said, ‘Well, hello!’ We talked for a while, and I asked her if she wanted to meet me after work for some tea or coffee. She did, and there you have it.”

  As my father and I sat that afternoon, the steam from our cups of tea forming a bridge between us, he reminisced about Brooklyn, Mom, and the 15th Street Bridge they met under each afternoon, and I was struck not only by what I was learning, but by how his perspective had been missing from what I did know.

  From then on, our afternoon tea sessions became as important as any other meal we shared together because of the emotional sustenance we took away from the topics we discussed. We shared stories the other never heard and compared notes on those we had. What my father told me on those afternoons over the course
of five years lifted the veil that had shrouded who my parents had been and who they became. He would reveal so much about my own life by adding detail to stories I had been told by others or had shaped through my own childhood perceptions. These conversations illuminated both our pasts and this new stage of our relationship. Through them we began to learn how and why we wound up in this place together.

  PART II

  We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it …

  —PENELOPE LIVELY, Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time

  CHAPTER 5

  Mustang

  THEY CALLED men like my father mustangs, military slang for officers who began their service as enlisted men. Mustangs were older and more experienced than other officers of their rank since, in those days at least, most officers received commissions from one of the service academies like West Point or Annapolis. Others had progressed through the ranks from enlisted to officer after service in World War II or Korea. My father enlisted and rose through the ranks from a private to full regular Army colonel before he retired after thirty-one years.

  “After I married your mother, I realized I had a family that I’d have to take care of,” he told me one day.

  We were having tea on the patio in the backyard and enjoying a late spring day before summer humidity set in. Dad was sitting at the patio table, under the umbrella, covered in his 100+ SPF sunscreen.

  “And?” I waited patiently as I evaluated which herbs I needed to replace in the flower bed I’d tended outside the kitchen door. More basil. Always more basil. Lots of cilantro, or maybe I should stagger the cilantro plantings throughout the summer, so the heat didn’t kill them all at once.

  “After the weekend we eloped, I went back to post and I talked to my first sergeant, Sergeant King, and asked him what I had to do to get promoted to corporal. He just laughed at me and said, ‘You wouldn’t make a good corporal.’ Then he asked me if my new wife could type. When I told him yes, he told me to bring her in the next Saturday. So I did, and he had her type up my application for officer candidate school.”