Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  You probably think I’m overreacting. You’re right. I’m not my father’s keeper. And who cares if he’s socially awkward? And anyway, my father wasn’t the one who felt awkward. He was having a pleasant experience chatting up the tattooed guy behind the register. I was the one having a problem.

  The cashier nodded at me. “That’s nice,” he said to my father.

  To others, my father comes across as quirky. Sometimes charming. Perhaps endearing.

  “His two daughters, my granddaughters, go to school at Pinkham Elementary,” my father said.

  I wished I could disappear into the floor. I was thankful that the cashier probably assumed my father’s rambling was an old-age thing, which it wasn’t. These outings are easier for me now that he’s older, because in my mind I can pretend that he’s senile, which usually alleviates the burn in my lower chest.

  “I moved to Visalia a couple of years ago, shortly after my wife died.”

  And there you have it—shortly after my wife died—he’d just slipped his toes across the tenuous boundary dividing what had been stranger-to-stranger chitchat, from what could have remained an appropriate public exchange to a veiled, albeit probably unconscious, slightly inappropriate grasp for deeper engagement. Why must he always do this? He gets people to feel sorry for him—a little at first—and then, if the conversation progresses, like if he’s at a restaurant alone, talking to the waitress and the couple at the next table overhears (which they do, because my father talks extra loud now that his hearing’s bad), he pours out his life story, which is a story structured to highlight his woes, a story that elicits sympathy, even pity, or, on occasion, an anonymously paid tab. I travel alone because my wife doesn’t enjoy travel; I moved because my wife died; I carry a photo of my dead daughter, Liza, would you like to see it?; My only friends live in Michigan and I haven’t seen them in twenty years, so I type letters to them on my electric typewriter which I got at Office Depot and I’m here at Kinko’s now to make copies of those letters, but you’re so kind—What’s your name? Charlotte?—you’re so kind when I come here to Kinko’s, that to be honest—and please don’t take offence, Charlotte—half the reason I come is to see your bright face each week.

  But why do I care? I wasn’t at Kinko’s when he poured his heart out each week. I wasn’t at the restaurant when the couple at the next table picked up the tab. If I’m not there, it doesn’t affect me, right? What was I bracing for, exactly—at that precise moment—there at the Save Mart register? What did I dread?

  The cashier’s eyes darted to the line forming behind my father. “I’m sorry to hear that. You’re lucky to have family here.”

  Family. You’re supposed to look out for your family. Be grateful to have family. Be proud of your family. In some ways I am. As I’ve said, on one hand, he’s a pretty cool dad—adventurous, carefree, inquisitive. Smart. On the other hand, I carry a sense of responsibility so heavy that it strains the double helix bridge suspended between us. Instead of merely noticing (what I interpret as) an awkward social interaction between my father and someone else, I actually feel it. I experience it. I own the emotion.

  I’m the one doing the overstepping, then, aren’t I? I’ve crossed the tenuous boundary separating my father from myself. How can I not? The line evades me, cloaks itself. Sometimes I don’t know where it is, or if it exists at all.

  His overextended transparency becomes my overextended transparency. He reveals too much, but I experience the pain on his behalf.

  Revealing too much.

  I suppose someone could say the same of a writer—of a memoirist or personal essayist. Aren’t I doing the same thing here, on the page? Exposing myself? Engaging in a form of public exchange—disclosing intimate details about my life, my past, my thoughts and feelings, my shortcomings, my unfulfilled aspirations—for the purpose of eliciting an exchange of some sort, an intimate transaction between writer and reader?

  The difference lies in the fact that when I play the role of discloser, I control the flow of information.

  My father controls his flow of information.

  When I appropriate the social fallout of my father’s flow, when I over-empathize, when I intuit the unspoken responses, the reactions, the judgments of others, I assume responsibility for a combustion of elements over which I have little control. (I suppose, though, in writing this memoir, I’ve turned the tables. My father has no control.)

  “Yes, I’m lucky,” he said.

  Instead of leaving the bag of groceries on the counter for my father to pick up himself, the cashier lifted it over the counter and placed it in my father’s hands. “You have a good day now.”

  “Right-o.” He took his bag and stepped away from the counter, whistling a few notes of Beethoven’s Minuet in G. He matched his stride with the rhythm of his notes and veered toward the parking lot.

  Forty

  Since my earliest childhood, my father and I have veered in and out of each other’s lives, at times curving dangerously close. Although we were separated by hundreds of miles and two mountain ranges from the time I was ten until I turned forty, for the first decade of my life we often, albeit sporadically, lived under the same roof. During those early years, I secreted certain objects when he zoomed too far away, and withheld other objects when he veered too near.

  From my perspective as a child, our living arrangements seemed unremarkable. I thought nothing of the fact that my dad maintained several simultaneous living spaces for himself. He shared a bedroom with my mother in our house on Ninth Street; he converted the detached garage behind the house into a combination studio-apartment-home-office for himself, which included not only his library and desk but a bed, dresser, and hi-fi record player; and he also bought himself a second home a few miles across town, which we referred to as his “pad” on Magnolia Street. Sometimes Dad lived with us, sometimes at his pad. Some afternoons he napped inside the house, sometimes in his office. Sometimes he brought his visitors into the kitchen for dinner, sometimes they stayed namelessly in the backyard or inside his private office. Sometimes he left for the weekend, sometimes the month. To me, it seemed like an easygoing arrangement between my parents. No drama—not that I was aware of, anyway. I thought all fathers kept separate quarters of some sort and everyone’s dad came and went unannounced. While at the time I didn’t begrudge him his absences—I didn’t know any different—what I wanted more than anything was his undivided attention.

  I recall one late afternoon in the living room when he recorded me singing songs as I made them up, impromptu. I must have been quite young, probably about six, a year or so before my brother was born. Our favorite grocery store was going out of business that week, and we had just returned home from our final shopping trip. As my mother unpacked the paper bags in the kitchen, my father suggested I sing a song about Lucky Mart into the reel-to-reel recorder. He held the microphone to my mouth, and as I concluded each song, he clapped, rewound the reels, and played the recording for us to hear. We did it again and again. I made up one Lucky Mart song after another while the world outside our front windows dimmed, until my mother finally announced dinnertime.

  Those were the moments I sought.

  But they didn’t happen nearly as often as I wanted. I suppose that’s why I took to snooping early on. When my father was away at work or staying at his Magnolia Street pad, I often snuck into his darkened office while my mother hunched over the rows of tomato plants in the backyard. I secretly pawed through the paper clips and ballpoint pens in the top drawer of his desk, pressed my cheek against the cold cylindrical metal of an unplugged microscope, gazed at—no, studied—the unclothed women in glossy magazines stacked along the bottom bookshelf, slid Jimi Hendrix albums from their jackets to feel the vinyl’s grain against my fingertips. Examining and touching these objects brought me closer to the man who owned them. If I couldn’t be the center of his attention, then his possessions could, as a convoluted substitute, occupy the center of my attention. I wanted to understan
d what he liked, even acquire a taste for his proclivities, simply because I wanted him to notice me, to like me. Sometimes I’d put the Jimi Hendrix album on the record player and lower the arm of the needle down. I did not understand this new kind of music, the rhythmless electric grind screeching from the speaker—it sounded like noise to me, like static from an unclear radio station. But perhaps I could learn to like it. So I climbed onto the double bed and bounced trampoline-style while the record spun its noise. I remember watching myself in the mirror that hung on the opposite wall, my bare feet pointed downward in mid-flight, my arms reaching for the ceiling. Jumping over and over, higher and higher, I eventually found the music’s beat. Yes, I could learn to like it, even love it. I transformed myself into a living, panting percussion instrument, the soles of my feet plunging into and springing from the mattress—I the drumstick, the bed a drumhead. As my outstretched fingers neared the ceiling, each time with greater upward velocity, I recognized that familiar sensation in my stomach, the same flying sensation I’d felt while riding in the backseat of my parents’ convertible when we zoomed full throttle through the California desert.

  Forty-One

  I recall one summer drive in particular, when I was around five years old. I’ve already told you how we barreled across the desert toward Death Valley, how gray waves of heat seethed from the highway, how the top of the Karmann Ghia was off and my mother’s brown hair flew wildly around her sweating face, how my father stepped on the accelerator and turned up the radio. I sat cross-legged in the backseat with a sweater tied like a turban around my forehead. The empty arms streamed behind me in the wind, rippling between my shoulder blades. I pretended the sweater sleeves were my hair, long and sleek, like the beautiful magazine women my father had thumbtacked to the wall above his desk.

  I told you how, there in the car, my mother didn’t respond, just stared out the windshield when my father told her a woman would be moving in with us. “Her name is Pat,” he said, “and she needs a place to stay for a few weeks.”

  It was too hot to have anything wrapped around my head, and I imagine my entire body must have been damp with perspiration. I didn’t care about the heat, though, and it never occurred to me that I’d be more comfortable without the sweater. Even so, I probably would have kept it on because it made me feel exotic and important.

  “Here’s the best part of the song,” my father shouted into the wind, and he turned up the volume on the radio. I don’t remember if he sang the words aloud or not, but I do remember how the road ahead ribboned up and down like a roller coaster, and how I held my breath every few seconds so I could hold onto the falling feeling in my stomach with each decline.

  “Faster,” I yelled.

  Forty-Two

  My father has been married six times (twice to my mother). I don’t know much about his first wife other than that she was a student of his when he lived in San Francisco, the marriage ended quickly, and I believe there was some sort of trading-grades-for-inappropriate-relations scandal surrounding his termination from that academic post. From there he landed a tenure-track job at Cal Poly Pomona, in Southern California, where he met my mother during her freshman year. They were married from 1963 to 1973, until I was ten and David was three, but it wasn’t a traditional setup. Besides my father’s numerous living spaces, he often invited students to live with us. I vaguely remember one long-haired couple who kept mostly to themselves, occasionally shuffling glassy-eyed and giggly from behind the closed door of their love den to pour me a bowl of Trix cereal, pat me on the head, and gush at my cuteness—but often the boarders were unattached females my father was either sleeping with or wanted to sleep with.

  I’m not sure why my mother went along with this. I attribute her tolerance partly to the 1960s free love culture, and partly to my mother’s unusual frame of reference. She’d had a traumatic and unstable childhood. My grandmother committed suicide when my mother was a child. My grandfather, a raging alcoholic and career criminal (among his many schemes: running stolen car parts for the “fence”; moonshine distribution; an elaborate check-cashing fraud), abandoned all four kids in the Ozarks of Arkansas when my mother was ten years old, leaving her to look after her younger siblings, the family living on blocks of government cheese and buckets of water hauled up from the stream. It’s nothing short of miraculous that my mother found her way to Cal Poly—a first-generation college student with more family complications than an academic application could possibly reflect. She married my father at eighteen, had me at nineteen. All this is to say: I have a hunch that my mother’s unusual upbringing skewed her perception about what a marriage should or could look like.

  Although my father was quite busy between his teaching, his secluded study time, and his comings and goings between two houses, he often responded if I asked for his attention outright. I recall one particular Sunday afternoon—I was in first or second grade at the time—when I wanted him to pick me up from home so I could spend the day with him at his Magnolia Street pad. It seemed like it had been quite a while since I’d seen him, several days or maybe weeks. When I complained to my mother that I missed Daddy, she said to call him on the phone and tell him so. I lifted the receiver from its cradle on the kitchen wall and dialed his number. I remember the brightly painted cabinets, yellow and green, and watching my mother wash dishes in the sink. “Busy signal,” I said to her. She shrugged. I redialed. Still busy. Again and again I dialed, maybe twenty times over the next three or four hours, and got nothing but a beep-beep-beep. The cuckoo clock above the pantry door had chirped several hourly melodies by the time I got through.

  When we got to his pad, I told him about my frustrating day, about how many times I’d gotten a busy signal. “Who were you talking to for so long?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t talking on the phone. I took the phone off the hook,” he said. “Here, let me show you what I was doing.”

  He went to the bookshelf there in the living room and reached for a large book with a white cover: The Joy of Sex. He sat down next to me, cross-legged on the shag carpet, opened the book, and pointed to several of the illustrations—drawings of couples in various lovemaking positions. “This is what grownups like to do,” he said, then proceeded to explain what was happening in those pictures and the mechanics of what went where.

  When I recount this incident to people now, the story makes them uncomfortable, which in turn makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know if that’s because my vocalization shades the incident differently for me, like I’m hearing someone else’s story, or if I’m reinterpreting my memory based on the facial expression of the person I’m talking to. But while the act of articulating this memory makes me uneasy now, I don’t recall such feelings when I sat in my dad’s living room that Sunday afternoon. I don’t think he meant to be inappropriate with me—I’m not saying he got a charge out of the situation or anything like that—but rather, I believe he meant this as a teachable moment, a time when the topic of sexuality could naturally segue into a conversation with his daughter. An organic birds-and-bees moment.

  Or do I protest too much?

  Good father or bad?

  We had a lot of those moments, times when the double yellow line faded nearly away, blurring the boundary between acceptable cultural norms and inappropriate parenting. The whole question, what’s appropriate and what’s not, wasn’t in his universe.

  Around that same time, when my father was staying at our Ninth Street house, I remember joining him in the shower. Some people might be horrified by a six- or seven-year-old girl showering with her father, but times were different then. Surely other people who grew up when I did tell stories about their laid-back hippie parents, about skinny-dipping in a neighbor’s pool or growing marijuana plants in the backyard. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. For a certain segment of society, the late sixties and early seventies culture was considerably lax and earthy and everybody-runs-around-naked compared to now—at least that’s how it was in my family, or else, how I
now choose to contextualize the situation.

  As I stepped over the side of the tub and behind the plastic shower curtain, my father handed me the bar of soap he’d just lathered up. I held the bar to my nose and inhaled the minty scent of lavender and hot steam. “Wash everything,” my father said as he rinsed his hair. He gave me an impromptu lesson on hygiene, telling me how important it was for me to get all the nooks and crannies of my female anatomy. He wasn’t overly explicit, but I do remember clearly his exact words: “It’s important for me that a woman is clean. I like my women clean, very clean.” I lathered, rinsed, shampooed, rinsed. End of shower, like any other day.

  I don’t recall feeling uncomfortable that day. But the funny thing is how vivid the memory is. Like the Joy of Sex memory. Not bad memories, or good memories, but in high-definition clarity: the silver-framed mirror above the bathroom sink, patterned with droplets of steam; a bar of soap, foamy with the smell of purple flowers; the living room carpet in my dad’s Magnolia Street pad, with its brown specked pattern in floppy strands of shag. Isolated chunks of tiny details loom disproportionately large in the landscape of my mind, like pieces of desert gravel the size of mountains.

  Images of certain objects from that time in my life—the mirror, the carpet strands, the peace-sign necklace hidden in my father’s desk drawer (Fondly, P.), the grooves in a Jimi Hendrix album, or isolated appendages of objects, if not necessarily the articles in whole, like the fuzzy arm of a sweater wrapped around my fore-head—these objects hold so much space in the archive portion of my brain that they push against, almost crowd out my recall of the events themselves. And these objects, none of which I physically possess today, I nonetheless hold dear, keep them clutched in my collection of memories. These objects of my affection are inanimate, objective by their very nature, and they possess no moral ambiguity. A sweater is just a sweater, nothing more. We use it—wear it, wrap it, wash it, toss it. The sweater asks for nothing. Not my affection or my attention. When I—of my own initiation and volition—when I love the sweater, use it, discard it, it truly is an object of my chosen affection. I can objectify the sweater, notice and employ at will. Ah, such power.