This is not the right thing to say. Sarah looks at me as if I’ve just voiced the most trivial concern ever uttered by a human being. She says crossly, “My friends at home and I don’t talk about anything but who likes who, and how mean our teachers are, and what we’re going to do on the weekend, which is nothing.”
I look out the window at downtown Conway and see two teenagers standing idly on the corner and resist the temptation to roll down the window and yell at them, “Which way to the public library?” Adults talk about the same things, and the world is still spinning, but I don’t say this. It would just confirm her worst suspicions. I offer, “People have been thinking deep thoughts for at least three thousand years and the world is still in a mess. I don’t think we’re going to be able to think our way out of it.” As Martin Heidegger allegedly said, but I don’t say. Let Being Be!
Sarah turns onto the street leading to the interstate. How would you know? her expression says. I wonder whether I should tell her that I was fired. I guess she was too busy thinking to see me on the tube the last couple of nights. I hate to worry her when she sounds so depressed.
“That’s the problem!” she says passionately.
“Nobody really thinks. They just shoot off their mouths, and if it’s glib enough, people go all to pieces like they’ve really heard something special.”
Glib? Not one of Sarah’s words. At least not around me.
One of her teachers? Or one of the words from a misunderstood small-town genius? Possibly the owner of a can of Lobotomy Beer? I’ll have to start doing a glibness check before I speak. As we pull onto 1-40 and head east, I say, “It’d be kind of quiet if people had to first figure out before they opened their mouths whether their words had a decent shot at immortality.”
Sarah laughs, the first sign of normality since I’ve seen her, but she says, “That’s exactly the kind of flip remark I’m good at. I can make people laugh, but that’s all. Nobody takes me seriously, and I don’t blame them.”
Her cheeks are red. If I weren’t in the car, she’d be crying.
This is absurd.
“You wouldn’t have been selected if they thought you were the village idiot,” I protest.
She shakes her head but does not take her eyes off the road.
“I got nominated partly because the teachers like me. Be sides, I probably count as a minority.”
I have thought this, too, but so what? No matter how you slice it, there’s more to success than just brains even in a so-called gifted and talented program. I have never really thought of Sarah as a member of a minority before. At the rate my career is going, I won’t care if she claims to be a full-blooded Hottentot if it will help her to get a scholarship to college. But maybe it bothers her.
“If that’s true,” I ask carefully, “does the minority part bother you?”
She clinches the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I’ve never thought about what I am. I have Negro blood, don’t I?”
“Some,” I say.
“Is that a big deal?”
Sarah runs her right hand through her curly ebony hair.
She surprised me by getting it cut short before Governor’s School. Her haircut shows her ears and looks good. For fifty bucks it ought to. I wanted to choke her when she told me how much she had spent. But it was her own money. She got a job in the spring at Brad’s Health Shoppe as a checker bagger.
“Dad, there’s a camp I want to go to as soon as Governor’s School is out. It’s just a week. It’s sponsored by the Arkansas Conference of Christians and Jews. A lot of my friends from Governor’s School are going.”
I study my daughter’s profile. Her light-brown skin makes me wonder how much African blood actually flowed in her mother’s veins. Rosa said she thought her great-grandmother had been brought to Cartagena as a slave. I have never told Sarah, nor, to my knowledge, did Rosa.
“Where do you fit in?” I ask, knowing this is going to lead to religion. We might as well cover the waterfront while we’re on the big questions.
Sarah bites at a fingernail on her left hand. I notice for the first time her nails are not painted. What has happened? Be fore Governor’s School she wouldn’t leave the house unless they practically glowed in the dark.
“Thanks to you,” she says irritably, “I’m not sure.”
Shit. Guilt begins to seep into the car like carbon mon oxide. I look out the window at fields of soybeans and think back to Rosa’s agonizing death. If that was a part of some body’s divine plan, spare me the other details. If I’d been smart, I would have made Sarah attend Mass, and by now she would have been sick of it and quit. Most kids do. I did especially after being made to go off to a Catholic boarding school.
“You can go to Mass any time you like. It’s not like they have it just once a year,” I say defensively.
“They let people who are atheists go to Camp Anytown,” my daughter says.
“You don’t have to be religious.”
An atheist! That sounds so lonely. Sarah has been the sort of kid who hasn’t demanded that kind of clarity from life.
Events have turned on a narrow radius of school, boys, and friends. ” So you don’t believe God even exists?” I say, making certain she knows I’m taking her seriously. One false note from me, and the radio will come on. The radio! The absence of her music is surely a measure of the weightiness of this conversation.
“So you’re a deist?” she asks, turning on the blinker to pass a truck.
I haven’t really thought about this subject for ten minutes since I left Subiaco, but a deist sounds safe enough. God minding His business; humans minding ours. Let Being Be!
“Sort of, I guess. Thomas Jefferson was a deist,” I say, wanting to put myself in good company.
Sarah smiles at my old trick of clothing myself with authority.
“I think deism is a cop-out,” she says finally, taking a wide swing around a mud-caked moving van in front of us.
“What’s the point of believing anything if all you’re going to believe is that God created the world?”
8
That sounds like a good week’s work to me, but I dare not make fun. Her expression is suddenly too grim. The truth is, if I have to put a name to it, deism is probably about all I can manage, and if I can believe what I read, science may be about to debunk that, too. Just because I don’t understand electricity doesn’t mean I’m not an ardent believer in it. And when some night Clan Rather, wearing his most pompous expression, announces that some scientist has discovered how the universe began, I’ll believe that, too.
“After your mother died the way she did,” I say truthfully, ‘religion hasn’t been an easy subject.”
For the first time since she has been driving, Sarah turns and looks at me full in the face. Her eyes are flashing as if she is angry.
“That’s what I thought, but you never talk about her dying.”
I feel irritated by this interrogation. What is there to say?
It was horrible, but tragedy happens to most people sooner or later. That’s the only consolation I know, and it’s not much.
“I thought it would be upsetting to us both, and all the talking in the world won’t bring her back.”
Her face is in profile again.
“I’m really sorry for you,” she says, her voice a whisper.
“I know how much you loved her. I think some of the things you’ve done just means you haven’t gotten over her.”
How patronizing! I feel my jaw tighten as I think of how to put her in her place. What does she know about what I do? I’m not so bad. The arrogance of children is amazing.
She goes off three weeks and comes back Socrates. If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then, all I’ve got to say is, sometimes the examined life isn’t so hot either. What does she know about life? Yet, I know what this is about. After Rosa’s death, I went a little crazy and brought to the house some of the godawful est wo
men. Just thinking about some of them makes my face itch. It wasn’t until I met Rainey that I began to calm down.
“It’seasy to be perfect when you’re seventeen,” I tell her, making my voice as snide as I can. “But even you, Sarah, may develop a few warts before your life is done.”
Sarah doesn’t speak, but I can see her lower lip beginning to tremble. Hooray for the old man! He hasn’t seen the best person in his life in nearly a month, and ten minutes later he has humiliated her.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, trying unsuccessfully not to cry. Noisily, she sniffs moisture back into her throat and begins to choke, so intent she is on trying to remain poised.
It is no use; my snottiness has broken a dam.
I find tissues in the glove compartment and hand them to her. Why can’t I keep my mouth shut? Is my self-esteem so low that I need to attack my child? She is crying so hard I’m
afraid we will wreck. I resist grabbing the wheel. I can see the headlines: IRATE FATHER CAUSES CRASH, KILLS TEN.
“I’m such a bastard,” I say loudly over her honking.
“I ought to be put to sleep.” I pat her shoulder. It feels papery thin, as easy to crush as her ego.
She laughs at my hyperbole and chokes again. Fortunately 1-40 is clear as we wobble back and forth across the intersected line like a pair of drunken ice skaters.
“I’m sorry,” I say, needing instant forgiveness.
“It’s okay,” she says, wiping her eyes with her knuckles.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
The truth is that neither of us can stand for the other one to be mad for even a minute. We want to please each other too much. We’d make a great teacher and student but in some ways are a poor father and daughter. We worry about each other’s feelings too much to be honest with each other for longer than fifteen seconds. This mutual protectiveness is presumably a result of Rosa’s death: the rare moment of candor I squelch. Suck it up and be a man for once, I think miserably.
“I tell myself I don’t talk about your mother to protect you,” I say, “but it is me I want to spare. I hate to admit how many good times I had with her, because I can’t imagine even coming close to being that happy again.”
“Oh, Dad,” Sarah says, now crying for me instead of herself.
I feel myself close to tears and wonder if I ‘m romanticizing Rosa. Perhaps, in some ways I am. She had a fiery temper, and occasionally she could be obstinate as a Colombian burro. But when we were in sync, it was bliss. She was pure emotion, alive in a way few people are, even for one minute of the day. Too, there is no way I can or should describe to my daughter the sensual pleasure her mother brought me. I tell her what I can.
“Remember how she used to mug for us? To be so beautiful, she could be incredibly silly. I’d come home from work and drag around the house and she’d start dragging, too. And remember how she’d pretend to be Woogie and get down on her hands and knees and pretend to charge you? You’d squeal and run jump on your bed.”
My daughter laughs with me, and a host of memories comes flooding back. These are easy-ones we’ve polished a dozen times. Like a tongue avoiding a sore tooth, I know how to stay away from the pain of Rosa’s death. Sarah’s laughter is perfunctory today, however.
“Was she afraid of dying?” she asks.
“Did she feel bitter about missing so much?”
I look out at the green, teeming fields. Sarah is bursting with life. Why this talk about death? Of course Rosa was angry at first. Who wouldn’t be? I explain the pop psychology of death.
“Supposedly, there are stages a person passes through. First, there’s denial; then you try to bargain with God for some more time, but finally there may be some acceptance. I think it was harder for me to accept than for her. Do you remember all of us crying on the bed together one night right before she died?”
“Not really,” she says, twisting a lock of hair.
“What happened?”
How can she not recall the most emotional night of our lives? I give her a hard look to see if she is trying to remember.
“It was about a week before she died. You slept with us that night.”
Sarah hunches her shoulders in irritation. I see that by not talking about that night, I may have deprived her of a valuable memory of how much her mother loved both of us.
Maybe a memory more important than a story about how happy we were. Yet, until this moment I had forgotten that Sarah had been on the bed, too. It had upset her to see me cry. Or that was how I interpreted her reaction. I was in sheer panic that night. Denial, still. What about the stages of death for those of us who go on living? That’s what religion is supposed to help you with; but if your wife dies young, to hell with it. Maybe, Sarah wasn’t as scared as I thought, just sad. Afterward, I got therapy for myself; it never occurred to me to take Sarah. Now, by not talking about Rosa’s death, I realize perhaps I have taken from her the opportunity to grieve for her own mother. We’ve never talked much about how Sarah felt. I figured she felt sad enough, so whenever the subject of her mother came up, I sentimentalized Rosa so we both would be left with a nice, warm glow. I have short-circuited her death so as to avoid the pain for her. As usual, it was for me, not her. I decide to take the plunge. My heart pounding, I say, “Believe me. You were there. It was after supper, and we were all in our bedroom. Your mother was in a lot of pain. I started crying and remember trying to leave the room, but she wouldn’t let me. She said something like, “For God’s sake, I’m dying! Stay and face this.” It made you start crying, and we all just sobbed. We ended up sleeping on the bed with her. Woogie, too.” My breath has started to come in short gasps, and suddenly tears are running down my face.
Sarah reaches for my hand, and her chest heaves.
“Didn’t she go back to the hospital the next day?”
And never came home again. I nod.
“After she was admitted some stupid bitch tried to make you stay down in the lobby because you were only thirteen.”
Something triggers the memory of that night for her, and Sarah, too, begins to cry.
“Let’s pull off the road for a moment,” I say, glancing behind us to make sure no car is about to rear end us if we slow down. I help guide the Blazer to the shoulder, and both of us cry together for the first time since that night. What have I been trying to accomplish by trying to pretend my daughter hadn’t seen me lose it? I’ve made Rosa into some kind of plastic saint. I’m surprised I don’t have a little figurine of her on the dashboard.
Her head on my shoulder, Sarah begins to hiccup. Finally, she says in a tiny voice, “Mom was a lot stronger than you, wasn’t she?”
Maybe it is time I admitted that. I swallow but a sour mass seems lodged in my throat.
“Somehow, she had the courage to face her own death and wanted me to face it, too. I didn’t want to. I guess I still don’t want to. That’s why I never talk about it to you. Just the marshmallow stuff.”
Sarah presses her head hard against my shoulder.
“It’s okay. I can take it.”
I wipe my eyes. Maybe character, too, is genetic. My life has been spent trying to avoid pain; my daughter seems ready to wade into the middle of it.
“Your mother,” I say, trying to remember what Rosa really believed and failing, “wasn’t the type to use crutches much. To her, the subject of God was more of a religious mystery than a crutch, and knowing she was dying didn’t change that.”
For some reason, Sarah seems to brighten.
“Why haven’t I remembered this before?”
I lean against her as cars and trucks whiz by us. Their drivers probably think we are lovers who have pulled off the road to neck.
“Probably because it was too painful, and you knew I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t really know about her religious beliefs. She always said it was more important what a person did than what they thought, and I guess I took her at her word.”
“Mom was an existentiali
st, huh?” Sarah says thoughtfully.
She already has a new vocabulary in three weeks. If I had tried to use a word with five syllables when I was in high school, my friends would still be laughing.
“If that’s what that word means, I guess so. She always said that talk was cheap.”
She turns and draws back to see if I am making fan of her, and apparently satisfied that I’m not, says, “I think she wanted to talk to me, too, but I was so scared.”
I touch my daughter’s bare arm in protest.
“You were only thirteen!”
Sarah, her face as severe as an angry judge’s, reprimands me, “She was dying!”
My stomach feels as if I’d swallowed my belt buckle.
Surely this is a burden she doesn’t need. My mind races to the day when I was about her age and I lay on my bed all day when my mother and sister drove from eastern Arkansas to the state hospital to see my father, who was dying of craziness. I couldn’t make myself go visit him. I tell her about that day.
“You shouldn’t expect so much of yourself, babe,” I say gently.
“It took me thirty years to forgive myself for not going to see my father.”
Sarah listens, but I can feel her judging me.
“We miss so much that way, though.”
I sigh. She’s right, but some people have more character than others. Some of us seem only to be able, as the song says, to do whatever it takes to make it through the night. I suppose I am of that ilk. I apologize.
“I should have spent more time worrying about how you were coping.”
My daughter pats my knee.
“You did all right. We’re both in one piece.”
More or less. I try not to think of the nights I came home late to find Sarah sitting on the couch in the living room wrapped in a blanket pretending to watch TV while all she was doing was watching the clock. Most of the time she was so glad to see me she didn’t mention that I stunk of bourbon, cigarettes, and the smell of a woman’s genitals. Some of the women I had the nerve to bring home. Sarah never gave them a chance. They weren’t bad just lonely, alcoholic types you can occasionally pick up in a lounge if you work at it hard enough.
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