by Robin Romm
But even if Duncan could have detected something sour, what could I have done? You can’t just leave your father to die in the desert after twenty-six years without him. Surely Duncan would have understood that.
I made my father a set of keys for the house. Silver for the front door, gold for the back. He could never remember which key was which, and so most days he would press the doorbell in a perky three-ring succession.
“I made you keys,” I would say as I opened the door.
“I know. But I just can’t remember which one is which,” he’d say, giving me an impish smile. Sometimes he’d leave the keys at home in the morning. I’d find them under a stack of newspapers or wadded up in an old lunch sack beneath the kitchen table.
“Sometime I might not be home when you lock yourself out,” I chastised.
“Ohhhh, you’re always home,” he said, his hair greased in rigid lines over his thinning pate.
He was a very messy man, my father. He’d leave the olive oil on the counter, bags of herbs strewn around it like windblown trash. His socks gathered in heaps and his bedroom began to smell sweet and fetid. While I brushed my teeth that strong, footy smell would waft through the door. When he went to work, I gathered up armfuls of his dirty laundry and threw it in the washer. I stripped his filthy sheets, dotted with toenails and hair, gathered the damp towels, straightened the stacks of papers and magazines. When he came home, he’d either pretend not to notice, or he really didn’t notice, that the room was orderly and aired out. This, more than the fact that I cleaned his bedroom in the first place, always infuriated me, causing me to bang pans around while cooking and burn my hand on the oven rack.
And then my father began to bring home friends—large, pomaded men from the garage suffering from various degrees of bowleggedness.
“Hey, it’s the missus!” they’d cry when they stomped in, dragging their oily fingers against the white walls. They’d gather on my small back patio, smoke cigarettes, and drink beer until the moon hung bright above them. I tried not to listen to them talk, but words slipped through the screen, over the tiles and into the kitchen. Women, car payments, garage politics.
I purchased a pair of earplugs. Fancy ones made out of an expanding gelatin. I worked in my kitchen and pretended they weren’t there. But eventually more and more friends began to appear. My father was popular, I realized. Ten friends crammed on the back patio gave way to fifteen. Then twenty. Brothers and cousins of the bowlegged men spilled down the patio steps, into the small parking lot I shared with my neighbor.
“Look,” I told him one night when he came in to go to the bathroom. “We have to discuss this.” I gestured toward the mob of greasy heads bobbing outside the kitchen window. My father paused, furrowed his brows.
“This isn’t your personal ballroom,” I told him. “You can’t just invite the entire garage over every night.”
“It’s not every night,” he said, wiping his brow with his forearm. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
He began to walk away.
“No! Wait a minute. It’s my bathroom, my house. You’re staying here. You can’t just do whatever you want whenever you want. There need to be rules,” I said.
He blinked incredulously at me.
“Rules?” he asked.
“Rules,” I said.
“What kind of rules?” His blue eyes turned one shade darker.
“Rules,” I said, “so that I can get something done around here. Not everyone in the world has your hours.”
“I’m your father,” he said gravely. “Watch how you talk to me.”
“You may be my father,” I said, “but you’re making me crazy.”
“Ah, well, family’s like a tin of nuts—”
“No, really,” I said. “Really, you can’t just come in here and take over everything. I spend hours every morning bleaching oil stains off the walls. If this doesn’t stop, you’re going to have to find somewhere else to live.”
He looked at me, then at the floor. He raised his dirtlined hand to his hair and stood with one palm pressed against the back of his head.
“Are you threatening me?” he finally asked.
Again I thought of Duncan. Some people go chasing these phantoms all of their lives. Each day begins with a shadow of loss that hangs with the curtains, each evening comes to a close with a list of ways things could have been. And here was my answer to all of that, standing puzzled and wounded in front of me.
“Maybe I am,” I said to him.
He entered the bathroom. I sat reading the same line over and over again. The men outside laughed big full laughs and a bottle of liquor broke on the cement.
When my father came out of the bathroom, his cheeks hung sadly. “I’ll tell them all to leave,” he said, and walked slowly out the door.
Soon the men went back to wherever they came from and my father traipsed in, closing the door with a pathetic click. He gave me a hurt look as he wandered past me into the living room.
The next few days my father returned from work silently, sighing and shifting in boredom. He would examine the contents of the fridge, pick up each container individually, and then set it back down. He’d get out a deck of cards, sit next to me, and shuffle them. He brought home a book of word finds.
“Can’t anyone else have people over?” I finally asked. “Why don’t some of your friends ever have parties?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t work like that.”
The morose mood that settled over him made him even more of a slob. Dirty Q-tips appeared behind the bathroom trash can. Beer cans wedged between the sofa cushions. Each morning I wandered the house with a mug of coffee, picking up the residue of his depression, burning piñon incense and scented candles. The house reeked of feet, earth, and flowers. The dog began to sleep with one paw draped over his snout. I began to get headaches.
And then the phone calls started. Hour after hour, the phone rang, even when my father was at work.
“Is your father around?” the voices would ask. Men, women, even small children called. I took messages for him in a spiral notebook. I filled one, then another. At night he sat in his bedroom, the phone dragged in, and returned phone calls. Who did he talk to all those nights, hunched over in his pungent bedroom? I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell me.
The mood was tense and the air thick. The dog began to tremble in his sleep. His tags rattled. I stroked his ears but couldn’t soothe him, and soon he trembled all the time. It interfered with his eating. Then one day I let him out in the yard for a minute, and when I went out to fetch him, he was gone.
Sometimes you lose something—an earring, a sweater—and you have a sharp hope that it will turn up. I walked every street of the neighborhood hollering for him. I hung bright yellow posters of his face on lampposts, on bulletin boards at the grocery, lunch counter, and nearby church. I even prayed. But the loss felt final. Infinite.
“Look what you’ve done!” I said to my father, my voice breaking.
“I wasn’t even home when it happened. I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“He couldn’t deal with the tension.”
“What are you talking about?”
“All the phone calls, the crap everywhere—”
“I think you have a stress problem,” he said, turning toward the fridge to grab a beer. “You need to chill out or you’ll die young.”
“Wouldn’t that be a blessing,” I said, slamming out to the yard to fume and miss my dog.
I went to the pound every other day, just in case he’d been brought there without his tags. I became friendly with the woman behind the counter.
“Sorry, hon,” she’d say when I opened the door, the bells on the handle dinging. “No beagles today.” I walked the strip of cages, looking at all the dogs, their dark, shining eyes pleading or distrustful. The plaintive barks reverberated off my body.
I was looking at my favorite dog—a runt with a bad case of mange but a sweet, polite bark, when I felt this cool,
highly charged wind pass behind me. It felt like a ghost, or what I imagined a ghost felt like, passing by in a tunnel of barking dogs. I turned to see.
He looked older, his hair short and his arms long. His shoulders stooped; I didn’t remember this about him.
“Duncan?” I said, walking toward him. He looked over. He seemed not to recognize me. But quickly, his face broke into a grin.
“No way,” he said. “No way.” His crooked teeth made him look honest. We went out for coffee.
Duncan was always a beautiful boy, and he grew into a beautiful man. His skin shone like copper rocks in a river and his eyes had this feline watchfulness, green as those bright spots in the sea. He had moved with Lucy to Santa Fe. She wanted to open a jewelry store, but the money got tight and the relationship fizzled and he moved back to Arizona.
“I wanted to call you,” he said sheepishly, “but I was too ashamed.” My heart soared and plunged; I felt a little sick. Duncan was peering at me from over his coffee cup. I tried not to look at him, taking stock of the cars in the lot. Three red ones in a row, flanked by trucks. A nice, cosmic symmetry. And then, suddenly, he laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell me about yourself, what you’ve been up to.”
I looked at him.
“Well,” I said, “for starters, I found my father.” Duncan’s hands tightened around his coffee mug; I watched to see if he would move them, but they remained still.
“What do you mean?” he asked gravely.
“Just that,” I said. “I mean I found him.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“So did I.”
Several women in bright windbreakers came through the door, noisily making their way to the end of the counter.
“So he wasn’t dead?” Duncan asked skeptically.
“Duncan, I really don’t know.”
A debate brewed inside him. Did he not believe me?
“Okay,” he said decisively. “You found him. That’s great! You know, you look good,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You look really happy. Your skin and your hair. That must be it, right? Your father.”
I tried to tell him the story, but he seemed pained and I felt like I needed to edit every detail.
“I’d love to meet him,” Duncan said, leaning across the table to take my hand. “I mean, if that would be okay with you.”
He was testing me. In Duncan’s world, fathers died and stayed dead. They left regrets in boxes of journals, mean mementos to remind the living of the futility of life.
“Well, he works a lot,” I said. Duncan nodded slowly. “But I suppose we could work something out. If you really wanted to. I mean, if you think—”
“I want to,” Duncan said. “I want to, really.”
We traded phone numbers and I returned to my house, a crazy shaking in my arms that wouldn’t stop.
My deadlines loomed, but I couldn’t settle down to work. I turned on the television in the living room. I turned on the radio in the kitchen. I turned on all the lights. I started the dishwasher. I cleaned out the fridge.
I was repotting every plant in the house when my father walked in. A strange thing happened then. I looked at his face, really looked at it. His skin puffed around his eyes. His stubble was dark and thick. Lines deepened further into his brow, touchable, traceable lines that grew shallow and almost imperceptible before his receding hairline began. His eyes were a brilliant, pale blue, too shocking for his plain face. And his lips—his lips were so pink. It hurt my heart to look at them.
My father, I thought, incredulously. My father.
I crouched over my African violet, soil wedged beneath my fingernails. There was suddenly so much I wanted to say to him. About living without him all of my life, about finding him, about the obvious stress this put on our relationship, about his life before me, about my life before him—
My father went to the fridge and took out a beer. He set the cap on top of the fridge, tipped his head back, and took a long, deep swig. Slowly, looking straight into my eyes, he swallowed and let out a rolling burp. Without saying anything, he kicked off his shoes and plodded into the living room.
The feeling of tenderness vanished.
I squeezed my hands into fists and then flattened them against my thighs. I still felt jumpy and wanted to tell someone about finding Duncan.
I walked into the living room and stood behind the chair where my father sat, his ankles crossed, watching baseball bloopers. He pretended not to notice me.
Waves of nervousness started in my stomach. I went back into the kitchen to make some peppermint tea.
The trash can was full to bursting. The beer, which took up an entire shelf of the fridge, had forced the bread onto the counter, the bottles of juice into the laundry room. I had taken to buying potato chips and mayonnaise, things I had ruled out long ago. I set up a workstation beneath the kitchen window, since my father had taken over my office. So much had shifted in such a short time. I began to drum my fingers on the table. My father began foraging for dinner. Leftover Chinese food, cheese, applesauce.
I didn’t know where to begin.
“Dad,” I imagined saying. But I hadn’t been calling him that. “Father,” I would say. “Father, I have this friend I would like you to meet.” How contrived. I couldn’t say that. We didn’t have that kind of thing going. I’d just have to bring Duncan over and hope for the best.
My father was busy making some sort of Chinese food melt in the toaster oven. The smell reminded me of my missing dog.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“Fine,” he said.
“Great,” I said.
“Gross, there’s rice in the silverware drawer,” he said. “Yuck.”
“I have an idea. You could clean it!”
My father began to scratch his inner thigh. I drummed my fingers again. The phone rang. My father turned, his face lit up, and he trotted off.
There’s no way in, I thought hopelessly. My father. How embarrassing. What would I tell Duncan? “I’m ashamed of him, Duncan. All of your life, you’ve wanted a father and now I have mine and I don’t want anyone to see him.”
He stalked back into the kitchen.
“Phone’s for you.” The receiver smelled faintly of beer breath.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Was that him?” Duncan whispered.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s amazing,” he said. I pressed my fingernail into the plastic crease that held the two halves of the phone receiver together. “Sorry to break the three-day etiquette thing, but I figured I knew you well enough to call when I wanted to.”
“Oh. Sure,” I said.
“So, I was thinking about having breakfast at the lunch counter near your house on Saturday, I guess that’s tomorrow, and I was thinking that would be a great time for us all to get together.”
I looked over at my father, who was standing, hypnotized, in front of the television. He turned off all the lights; the colors from the screen bathed him in reds and blues. It made him look spooky.
“Tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yeah, how does that sound?”
“Duncan, I don’t know how to say this but—”
“What?” Duncan asked.
“Well. It’s just that things have been topsy-turvy.”
“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “You guys just meet me at the counter at eleven. That’s not too late, right?”
Now I was in a bind. I could show up alone and Duncan would think I had been lying; I could stand him up and it would seem like I had been lying; or I could bring my father and hope that he behaved, well, fatherly.
“Hey,” I said to my father after Duncan hung up. “We have breakfast plans.” He glanced over his shoulder at me.
“Says who?”
“Says Duncan.” My father looked at me blankly. “My ex-boyfriend.”
; “You had a boyfriend?” my father sneered.
“We’re meeting at the lunch counter at eleven tomorrow.”
“Fine with me,” he said, cracking his knuckles.
I looked at the lines of my father’s body. Though not a tall man, he did have a sort of presence. His build didn’t indicate a delicate spine—no gorgeously stacked vertebrae. Instead he looked bolstered up by a large pole of metal.
I thought about the way that blood goes through the body. The liquid seems to know exactly which way to go, as if every cell in the body has a tiny, thoughtful brain. I thought of my father’s blood, my father’s bones, the ligaments that held him upright like that, his arms crossed, his legs apart.
How smart the body is. I closed my eyes and felt my own blood racing through my veins, making my hands and feet warm. I wished I could ask those tiny brains what to do.
My father’s Chinese food melt lay half eaten on a plate on the coffee table. Some noodles had fallen to the floor, glued there by orange cheese. He’d already gone through two beers, the bottles wedged haphazardly between the couch and the wall. His socks, as usual, had been tossed like bait into the center of the room.
In that moment, my impatience with him ebbed. I wasn’t filled with a strong, peaceful love or anything. I just felt resigned. And this felt like progress.
“So, eleven, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll just walk over there a little before, okay?”
My father didn’t turn around. “Whatever you say. You’re the boss around here.” He changed the channel. Strange shadows came and went.
“I guess I’m going to bed now,” I said. “Good night.”
“Mhmm,” went my father and then guffawed at the commercial.
I felt heavy and empty; I lay in bed for a long time without sleeping. I would get up in the morning, clean the house, get dressed, have coffee so I was alert for the lunch counter encounter. Somewhere, in between thoughts, I fell asleep.
I woke exhausted, a feeling of failure in my bones. I looked at the clock. Ten-thirty.
“Shit,” I said, throwing myself out of bed. “Fuck fuck fuck.” I threw on a robe and dashed into the bathroom. I began to strip off my pajamas when I realized that the bathroom was spotless—the sink wiped clean, the toilet seat down. The razor and shaving cream that usually crowded my toothbrush jar off the shelf were gone. I put my robe back on and went to find my father.