by Ursula Hegi
I stroke the backs of my father’s hands, the raised veins, the creased valleys between them. “The same woman’s voice was on the next message too, Dad. Very agitated. ’Hello, this is Mrs. Lodge from Tiffany’s school again. Hello—’”
“Hello,” my father echoes. “Hello …”
“’Hello, are you there? We reconsidered and decided to keep Tiffany here at school until you can pick her up.’”
“Children …”
“Do you think Mrs. Lodge ever realized she had the wrong number?”
He coughs. Winces.
“Daddy?”
His body is shaking with each cough. “Those stitches—”
I slip my palm beneath his neck. “Daddy?” Lift his head off the pillow till he stops coughing. “You want me to get the nurse?”
“No.” He takes a careful breath. Another. As though he were learning to breathe all over again. “Not the nurse. She says I’ll die twitching … because of the rabbits. Patients who eat rabbits will die twitching.”
“I can’t believe anyone would say that.”
“I only ate rabbits in Austria, John … never in America.”
“If she said that, she didn’t mean it.” Cautiously, I guide his head back down. His pillow feels too rough for his brittle skin. “And you’re not going to die. You hear me?”
“Children … You should …” His voice trails off.
Music from a car radio comes closer, booms, fades. It’s still warm enough to drive around with open windows.
“Listen to that,” my father says. “You and Nick—you tooled around like that. I used to wish I…”
“In Austria—did you tool around in Austria?”
“Something to do for kids in America. We … were men when we were fourteen. Not boys … like you. And we didn’t have cars… like here.”
When I was in high school, we’d cruise up and down the few familiar blocks through town every Friday night, take a U-turn, and loop back. Joseph, Oregon, was bordered by the immense Wallowas, which kept us there. The highway, however, suggested a world beyond. As we cruised—the girls three or four to a vehicle, the boys alone—we’d approach and pass each other again and again, glancing around with practiced aloofness as we posed in our souped-up trucks and cars. My cousin, Nick, who was blond and tanned quickly even in winter, painted his truck bright yellow, as if to transmit the colors of his body to the outside. Some vehicles would stop along the side of the street, where we’d sit on the hoods, watching this parade of our own making that we’d been getting ready for all week—the boys in jeans and T-shirts with the name of a rock band; the girls in shorts and tops with spaghetti straps. Uniforms, of sorts.
Since we all went to the same school, we knew exactly how each of us was pegged—popular or not-so-popular—and while those ratings still defined us, there was a chance that they might change on Friday nights: because a popular girl might climb from her friends’ car into a boy’s vehicle and elevate his rating forever; because a boy might suddenly lean from his truck window to look into the eyes of a not-so-popular girl and make her desirable from that day forward.
My mother once said our cruising reminded her of a ritual she’d seen as a student teacher in a Mexican village, where the young women would stroll around the fountain in a plaza after dusk, scrutinized by the young men who leaned against the columns of the promenade. Our cruising ritual, she said, was not all that different, except that we could be anonymous, protected by metal and glass, by the speed at which our cars moved, by the blaring music that made it possible to ignore comments we might not want to hear.
“Listen …” my father says again, long after the car radio has faded.
“Yes?”
“I think you should …” He looks immeasurably sad.
I try to cheer him. “Do you think Mrs. Lodge still has Tiffany with her? A week after those phone messages?”
“I think … you should have children, John.” At least he’s no longer talking about bugs.
“I’m too young, Dad.”
“It’s the most important thing … I’ve done in … my life.”
Too important But of course I can’t say that aloud.
“I would have called that… Mrs. Lodge.”
“But I didn’t know from which school she — “
“I would have found out.”
“I believe you.”
When I was three years old, he started taking me to his office occasionally, where I enjoyed playing on the floor next to the receptionist’s desk while he was in a room, working on patients. By the time I was in preschool, he’d reschedule or cancel appointments to attend conferences with my teacher. The same, later, with grade-school conferences, with high-school plays and concerts. At home he’d quiz me about my classes, check my homework late at night, discuss with me what he allowed me to watch on TV.
The women I dated before Eleanor used to envy me for having him as a father. “He’s so supportive of everything you do,” they’d say.
“Too supportive,” I’d answer.
But they’d still go on. “And he’s totally devoted to you.”
I’d nod. “Oh, yes, totally.”
What I first loved about Eleanor was that she told me, “Your father holds on to you too much.”
My mother used to sit with me when I did my homework, but the more my father nested himself in my life, the more she receded. Until he had taken so much of me that there was nothing left for her. It was then that she started feeding the deer, luring them close to our house with apples and buds and acorns and twigs. Closer yet with salt blocks for them to lick. At first, they approached cautiously, stiffly; but soon they romped through our garden as if it were their domain.
“Did you know,” my mother said to me, “that deer need at least six pounds of feed a day to last through the winter?”
“Did you know,” my mother said, “that if a pregnant doe gets too thin she’ll absorb her unborn?”
“Did you know,” she said, “that she turns it back into being part of herself?”
Up close, my mother’s deer were mangy—matted fur; patches of scabbed hide—and I wished I’d only seen them from a distance, where they’d been lithe and graceful.
My wife says I do better with everyone at a distance, not just deer. “It’s where you’ve placed your father. Your mother too, though not that much. It’s what you do with your clients.”
“It’s my clients who want the distance,” I remind her. I install security systems for the summer people who built immense houses that encroach on the marshes and ponds of the Oregon coast, on the streams and ocean, endangering the animals that are forced from their habitats. The larger the body of water, the more flagrant the house, and the more exorbitant the system to keep it protected.
“I won’t let you place me at that distance,” Eleanor likes to tell me. She is a fierce fighter, my wife. Fights as easily and passionately as she laughs. Even fights me when I refer to her as my wife. Protests that it sounds like one word: mywife. To bait her, I sometimes call her that when we make love. Mywife. Until she presses her knuckles against my ribs or tickles me.
“What’s it worth to you?” she’ll ask if I beg her to stop. “What’s it worth to you, John?”
“You’ll get to climax first next time.”
“The two next times.”
My father is watching the sky get darker, turning purple. The trees are no longer three-dimensional, just black cardboard cutouts. Without depth. All one.
When he forbade my mother to feed the deer—“your goddamn vermin,” he said —she moved into the house of her friend Helen, the art teacher at the high school where my mother taught. Since my father didn’t want to admit that she’d left him, he told our neighbors he was sending her away because she was letting the deer destroy our perennials.
My mother’s tears returned to her once she lived in Helen’s house by the edge of the forest, where deer came to her readily, and where I stayed with her during the
week. The lens of the binoculars flipped. Set her into proportion. She grew taller, wider. Even her voice became fuller.
It was easy to breathe inside her house. But Friday evenings my father would claim me, challenging me to do better, yet undoing my accomplishments by reminding me he was the one who’d urged me to do better: paint the fence in one day; get an A on a science test; swim twenty laps in our pool…. I try not to do that to others—make their accomplishments mine. Or force them to my will. The way my father did with that pool. How I hated that pool. He and I dug it together after my mother left. I was eleven, and he pushed me past blisters, past tears, past tiredness, telling me how those things that were the hardest for us allowed us to live the rest of our lives with ease.
That first night he and I used the pool, the underwater light turned the water a transparent green, tracing the dark shapes of our arms and legs with tiny bubbles. The water felt like velvet, and our movements seemed slower than during the day. And I thought that maybe my father was right, that the easy part of my life was starting.
But the following morning, I found him crouching by the side of the pool as though he’d dropped something into the water. He pointed to the surface, where two chipmunks floated, no more than a foot apart from each other.
“Are they dead?”
“I think so.” His face was pale. “You better get them out.”
Just seeing those small, stiff shapes gave me goose bumps. “Dad-”
“Never make a coward’s choice.” He looked at me steadily. Then turned and went into the house.
My hands felt damp as I got a trash bag and the aluminum pole with the net. Slowly I dipped the net into the water, pulling it forward until it caught the body closest to me. Maybe I could get both at once. But when I lowered the pole, the chipmunk fell from the net. It sank slowly, turning over, then rose back to the surface. I squinted against the bright sun. The hot smell of chlorine clotted my nostrils. Pressing my teeth together, I bent for the pole, careful to try for only one of the chipmunks this time. After I’d caught it, I swung the net to the edge of the pool, but when I opened the trash bag to drop the small body into it, one of its stiffened claws was tangled in the net.
I wanted to run to my room. Stay there. But my father would only send me back out. And suddenly it didn’t feel right anymore, obeying him, making the hardest choice. It was twisted around. Not the way it was supposed to be. Eyes blurry with tears, I searched for a twig to pry the chipmunk from the mesh. At first I was afraid of breaking its front leg, of hearing it snap, but after a while that no longer mattered. All I wanted was to get it over with. I threw the twig aside and, with my fingers, pried the rigid claw from the net. With a soft thud, the animal fell into the trash bag. Its eyes were black like crinkled leather. Getting the second chipmunk was easier. I left the pole by the water and carried the bag to the garage, where I dropped it into the trash can and pressed down on the lid. Only when I was soaping my hands and arms up to my elbows did I realize that my cheeks were aching and that I was still clenching my teeth.
I never told Eleanor about that day by the pool. Because I knew it would frighten her. Not just what my father did. But that I would obey like that. And the damage I was doing to myself.
Although we’ve been married four years now, I still follow the visiting pattern my parents drew up between them when they divorced—alternate Christmases. Thanksgivings belong to Eleanor’s family. The first Christmas we were married we spent with my mother, who has a house just ten minutes from ours. She applied for a teaching job in Lincoln City soon after I moved there. Year two of our marriage, it was my father’s turn to have us for Christmas. Like some gift he was entitled to. I didn’t want to travel across Oregon to be miserable. Worried how he would be with Eleanor.
It was worse than anything I’d imagined. She admired the table he’d set with crystal goblets and the gold-rimmed plates he’d inherited from Austria. Told him, “You didn’t have to do all that work for us.”
My father slammed the oven door. “As you wish,” he said, and removed the good china and silver and linen. Then he threw plastic utensils on the bare table and tossed paper plates as if they were Frisbees, making each one land between a plastic fork and knife.
“Quite a performance,” Eleanor said calmly.
He squinted at her. “Let’s sit down and eat.”
“Good.” To me, she whispered, “Can he control his temper?”
“I think he’s showing off.” I rolled my eyes, tried to pretend the whole thing wasn’t as awful as it was.
The following day, he packed Lebkuchen and Stollen on two of the serving platters he’d yanked off the table just the night before, wrapped them into bath towels for us to take home, and when Eleanor objected, he persisted, “You can bring them back the next time you visit me.”
In the hospital parking lot, a car door slams and a motor starts. Two motors. Probably visitors leaving.
I stand up. Against the slick linoleum floor, my shoes look scruffy. “I have a long drive back home,” I explain. “I should — ”
“You — ” My father motions me close.
“Yes?”
“You — ” His voice is hoarse, his breath shallow. He says something else I can’t understand.
“Are you talking about Tiffany?” I shouldn’t have mentioned her. Now he’ll keep fretting about her and that poor Mrs. Lodge who is holding on to the forgotten child in school. Just as he frets about the librarian who bequeathed him her heart, and about her parents to whom she is lost. While he is carrying their daughter inside his chest as though it were a womb—the closest he has come to giving birth. His ultimate goal, I suspect. Though I’ve heard people say the human race would become extinct if men had to give birth, I believe my father would have gladly endured the pain of bringing forth children from his body. A dozen children. As many children as his body could yield.
“You …” My father’s mouth is trying to shape itself around words.
I sit down again. Bend closer. “I’m sure Mrs. Lodge reached Tiffany’s father that same day. He is probably a very good parent.”
One of my father’s pale hands makes a faint arch, as if to dismiss that possibility.
“This Mrs. Lodge,” I say, “you know, if she—”
“You were conceived—”
“Let me fix your pillow,” I offer quickly. I don’t want to hear about my conception.
“… during the first… moonwalk.”
Absurdly, I see my father and mother coupling on the dimpled surface of a chalky moon, levitating parallel to each other in padded space suits, exposing only what is needed to conceive me.
“… that summer of 1969,” my father says. The bead of sweat between his eyebrows hasn’t moved. Just sits there like a hardened drop of Crazy Glue. Some of his words slur as he tells me how my grandparents were visiting from Austria for an entire month that summer, staying with him and my mother in the green Victorian where they rented a small apartment on the second floor. To dodge my grandparents, my father would disappear with my mother into the bedroom and resume his attempts at having a new baby, to start his family once again, a large family, supplant my mother’s sorrow for the girl she had miscarried. But for over a decade nothing had happened, though my father had begun to chart my mother’s fertile days on graph paper. A decade of fertile days. And what he tells me about the moonwalk is that the television was on in the living room, right outside the bedroom, and that he and my mother could hear the voices of my grandparents marveling in German at the American astronauts.
As my father pauses, I’m left with the picture of my grandparents—long since dead —in the apartment where I grew up. They have pulled the tufted sofa with its carved armrests up to the television. Behind them, a striped curtain hides a Sears refrigerator-sink-stove combination and cupboards that will still smell of nutmeg and scouring powder when I am a boy. Through the window I can see the peaks of the Wallowas. Across the hall lives a man from India with pitted sk
in who works at the local shoe store and wears black ties even on his day off. Though pets are banned from the building, he has four cats; I’ll never see them, but at night I’ll often hear them and learn to distinguish their cries.
At the moment, however, when my grandparents’ trim bodies lean forward, I have not yet been conceived. Their mountain-brown faces are set in concentration as they witness the astronauts take their initial steps across new territory.
“I think …” My father fidgets on his pillow. “I think they felt lucky to be in America.”
“Lucky?”
“They said it felt… nearer to the moon than Austria.”
Lucky to have arrived here, to be with the son who left them behind, the son whose German words are tinged by his American life. I don’t want to imagine my parents in the bedroom, limbs entwined, their wishes giving shape to what is to become me. What I want is to find out what is to become of my father now. He seems quieter, kinder than he used to be. But what if it’s not the donor’s heart that has done this? What if my father has been like this all along, and I have failed to recognize him?
He’s tugging at the neckline of his hospital gown, and I’m stunned by the suddenness of my grief, know that this past year—ever since he had his first heart attack—I have been grieving for him. I just didn’t know the language.
“I want to finish those books for her. I don’t know how she keeps track of all the different plots…. Bathrobes.”
Somehow I figured I’d always be running from him. It’s what I’m used to. What I’m good at.
“They sat in front of the television in those bathrobes…. Without knowing a word of English … went to the store and—” He frowns as if he’s forgotten what he wants to say.
“Bathrobes,” I prod him. “Television. Stores.”
He nods. His voice becomes more coherent as he glides into memories that are nearly three decades old. How my grandparents read travel guides in German. How they navigated without the precise words to describe what they needed, relying instead on intuitive sounds and gestures. How pleased they were to be understood by the saleswoman who didn’t speak one word of German and yet sold them those bathrobes. “The next day they went back to the store. She was… their first American friend, they said, and they brought her—”