The Book of Dads

by Ben George

Soon. But not just yet.

  FEBRUARY

  I’m finally getting the hang of this fathering thing. I don’t wake up in a panic so often now on the days when I change the first morning diaper, strap Avery in his car seat, drive him to day care. I guess I’ve relaxed a little, gotten used to the four-hour blocks of solo child care. Avery is at an age now where the ratio of need to self-reliance, demand to openness, is well balanced. Most of the time.

  I awake to a quiet house. Little Avery kicks at my kidneys, slippery bottle dancing in his hands. When I raise my palm up by his face, he takes one hand off the bottle and gives me a rhythmic high five. That is, until he discovers my wedding band. He keeps mouthing sounds inside his bottle, “ring” or “daddy” or “ball,” and turns his head to make sure Mommy still lies beside us.

  I remember my dream. In it, the truck is edging toward a small cliff. I’m braking but it’s not helping. Even the emergency brake proves useless. The whole show is going over. I reach for the driver’s door, start pushing it open with my shoulder, but we’re going down. It’s not until I am up pissing in the toilet that I think to question. Was Avery in the backseat of the car, strapped in the car seat?

  MARCH

  I just tried to put Avery’s shirt on while he was in Ali’s lap. The maneuver took him by surprise and he resisted. When Ali tried to soothe his screaming, Avery threw a soft jab toward her face. “Time out!” I said authoritatively, and took him to his room. “No hitting Mommy!”

  “Not!” Avery answered, somehow managing to sound weak and belligerent at the same time. Ali followed us in to remind me, “It was your move that surprised him.” I promised Avery I would not pull the shirt over his head. Avery relaxed and relented. “Ha,” he said. “Hum.”

  It took a while for Avery to warm back up to me; you could see his worry slowly dissipate. But as soon as we were all hanging out on the bed, Avery began to scream and holler. He didn’t seem distressed, more like he was trying on Daddy’s anger, throwing his voice into the charged air.

  Eventually Avery kissed his mom’s nose by way of apology and accepted his stuffed cat. We headed back downstairs. “My cat!” he said, thumb out of his mouth. And I agreed. Most definitely his cat.

  When Avery cries, something in my gut churns; when he spies something new, my heart leaps with his. I remember just a few months ago joining a friend and his son for a Saturday morning canoe ride. The fog came off the bathtub-warm water in little riding waves, splatters of mist lifted up by the breeze in a swirling white spray that splashed Avery softly across the face. Avery pointed out a heron in the trees. Our two canoes glided through the fog silently—the only sound, two fathers chatting quietly. Then Avery cried “bird,” thrusting out his hand, his little extended finger following the line of a crow to the tippy-top of the tallest pine.

  APRIL

  Though my father has been dead now for seven years, there are times late at night, alone in my study, when I pick up the phone and start dialing. It takes a moment to realize that he is no longer at the other end of the late-night phone line. It takes a while to comprehend that, though I am still his son, he is not around to be my father. How important it is to be there for Avery as long as I can and in every way possible. Our daily conversation is the way we love each other. Silence is a river we cross at flood tide.

  In the last years before my father died, our relationship as father and son transformed dramatically. We’d both found partners with whom we hoped to settle. Each planned to stay in one place for more than a few years. None of this is new. Both of us in a state of serial-monogyny recovery.

  But somehow the roles had reversed. All of a sudden my father was looking to me, to my marriage with Ali in particular, and seeing the stability I’d found with her as something to strive for. I mean really hope for. That maybe I had become, in some small way, his role model for a new way of life. But I’m unsure he was really going to make it that way. (How could he? It had never worked before.) At the funeral, one of his best friends told me that my father had already had one foot out the door. “He kept making promises he couldn’t keep.”

  I don’t know. I always thought a promise was a sailor looking for wind, angling his boat toward its best chance at speed. All I know is how happy his grandson would have made my father. How happy I’d be to watch them play together.

  In this morning’s Writer’s Almanac, Paul Bowles is quoted as saying: “Everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?”

  I am not sure if this quote depresses me or lifts my spirits; affirms something I’ve always felt but never before articulated, or quietly strips me of hope. Maybe a little of both? Perhaps this is why having a kid is so rewarding: That, besides everything else, through Avery I am able to return more often to the mysterious well of the past. That I live vicariously in his journey. On an outing to a neighborhood park, I share the adventure with my son while reconnecting to that “certain afternoon.” I get to be a boy again.

  MAY

  I’ve come to see raising a child as hands-on training for death and dying. The lack of control you finally recognize and then succumb to, the grip (already an illusion) slackening from firm to grasping to loose. Your sense of the future altering under the demands of the ever-pressing moment. Where’s your head when the boy falls into the lake with a Pooh-like plop? But, too, the joys—the flashes of insight Ali and I have witnessed and celebrated. Avery, our wonder-filled prince. The day an escapade. In fathering Avery, I am humbled and exalted. With him, I stand at the altar of my life, disheveled, utterly unready for the next thing.

  The winter chill has made its last appearance, cloaked in the ghostly robes of fog and mist. When I let Ursula off the leash at the edge of the thirteenth green, the landscape before us has been whitewashed into a coliseum of topless trees, a roofed stage of gray-green pathways. She advances into the scene, low to the ground, radar already attuned to the squirrels running for the stage-set columns. Avery, in his stroller, wakes up from his drift, raising his head out of the blankets to watch Ursula hunt. Two large crows stand like valets on a lawn across the road. I follow the dog down into the white-out holler, hoping no mad morning golfer tees off from the top of the hill. On the road back, Avery hunkers down in his blankets, cold, teetering on the cliff edge of nap.

  JUNE

  I know Avery is my boy when he stops at the park entrance, spies the pickup basketball game, and calls out “B-ball!” When he looks up to catch the trajectory of a crow’s flight from tree to tree and calls out “caw caw” in camaraderie. He runs ahead to the swings and I lag behind to watch the four out-of-shape white guys shoot hoop. I can’t help figure out what I’d need to do to beat them. That one guy in the jeans would give me trouble with his quick first step. Avery comes back to the bench, mouthing “B-ball” over and over.

  The other half court is free, so Avery and I run around for twenty minutes, dribbling and kicking the ball. Avery picks up the huge sphere and throws it over to me, crying, “Me shoot!”

  He even turns to me after I hit a baseline jumper and says “Nice shot, Daddy.” I pick him up and let him try his boy best to associate the round ball with the round rim high above. “Dunk,” he says, and drops the ball on my head.

  Yesterday, on one of our typical neighborhood rambles, a fully built house stood in the spot where, just the day before, I swear, a foundation squatted. The house stood tall in its two-story height, windows in, a freshly painted front door. Even a porch. The branches of two rain-saturated oaks brushed its top gable. For a moment, it was as if summer had fast-forwarded and the light rain we were tromping in had become a fall rain. As if the house was built time-lapse.

  Ursula is oblivious, nose tuned to the fine frequency of cat. Avery doesn’t seem to notice, either. I ask him if anything about the street or the y
ard seems different to him. He smiles, enjoying the premise. He looks around. After a minute or so of this concentrated, cartoon silence, I think he’s faking. But just then his eyes light up, as if the house suddenly blipped onto his radar screen. “The house,” he says, laughing. “Wasn’t there before.” He starts walking on. Then he stops and turns around.

  “How did it get there?”

  “My guess is they trucked it here in two or three pieces and set them down with a crane.” I start walking and he hurries to stay in front of me. He nods when I point out the red-clay tracks on the road. Evidence of the haul.

  AUGUST

  Two years ago yesterday, Avery came into our life. Adoption Day. Family Day. We lit a candle, sang family songs. Avery got some new books and an old record player from Ali’s parents, Nana and Poppy. It came with a stash of old LPs—musicals, Disney records, a few folk recordings. Avery stayed up an extra hour learning how to put the records on the turntable, drop the needle on the outer edge, and then push the lever to 33. He loves how the record seems to wake from sleep, the music rising up out of a blurred growl.

  So do I. I love how Avery falls asleep in degrees, finally hunkering down in his blankets with Cat, a rainbow of cloth books draped around him. Love his bright blue eyes, the Harry Potter-esque checkmark vein on his forehead. The funny, lovely way he sounds on the phone when I call from Vermont or Los Angeles, or from whatever makeshift reading tour I’m on. How “Vermont” stands for travel, both an act of leaving and a destination. “How was Vermont, Daddy?” I love how Avery has insinuated himself so deeply into our lives and how, in kind, we have grown our life around him. Hard to imagine what life was like even a few years ago.

  We take Avery to the aquarium on a drizzling late morning at the end of a long weekend. We are among a horde of parents trying to give their children the freedom to imagine themselves into a wider world. To take a breather, maybe catch up on some talk as the toddlers get entertained by that wider world. There’s so much I hate about these places—the lines of bored people, the trapped animals, the deluge of blah. Despite my desire not to, I become this little airy, acid aristocrat afraid to get dirty. I hate the conveyor belt of canned experience so much.

  But it doesn’t take long for Avery to open all that up. He’s running from display to display, getting high off all the kid energy whizzing around the building. I follow after him like a shadow, like a bodyguard, freed by the duty of keeping him safe. Avery keeps making ill-timed runs at the escalator. Gradually, small moments start to slip in. The tiny mad propulsion of the seahorse’s back fin; the way the owl’s face turns as if on a hinge, its night mask wheeling into view, mute and old. The heron disguises itself in plain sight, lost from view inside the marshland replica on the roof. Its stick legs doing their best imitation of grass stalks. That sad, soulful look that actually says nothing.

  SEPTEMBER

  It is the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah. Our favorite time of year! It has always felt like the true New Year to me, with the weather changing over, the fall equinox just passed. A time of repentance and transformation. Time to reconnect with friends and family. To take a pause in the hectic day-to-day, look up and look in. The Green Man in me loves it all; ritual and prayer a kind of moving solace. A charged being walking through a charged landscape.

  One way Ali and I have marked our lives (besides the academic calendar) has been to see this block of time as sacred. My birthday one bookend, end of summer; Ali’s birthday another, late November, the full turn toward winter. The days between are a landing strip of change, a walking bridge above a burgeoning river.

  Now with Avery in our life, we want this time to take on deeper significance. Not sure how, but I want us to pass on a certain sense of things to Avery, a quality of attention and care. For Halloween, we joke, we will dress Avery as the Green Man. He likes getting his face painted green. We want him tuned into the turning of the seasons; he wants to follow the jack-o’-lanterns up the hill and knock on all the doors.

  OCTOBER

  One morning this week, I find a wasp edging the mirror in the downstairs bathroom. Avery likes to run into this room, shut the door behind, and get lost in the dark for a moment before I “rescue” him. It’s easy to imagine the wasp at his ear, waking from a drowse, so I trap the wasp in a cup and bring it outside carefully.

  Avery started at a new day care today. He clenched my hand tight as we let the controlled chaos of the class ebb and flow around us. Kids were paired at various stations. Teachers smiled and went back to their projects with the kids. Eventually, Avery released my grip and drifted over to one of the teachers who had waved him over to the watercolor table. Not even looking back, he floated a quiet “bye” over his shoulder.

  Picture me driving home from the day care. Imagine with me what it will be like for us in a few years. Avery is turning five, starting kindergarten. He stands at the opening of our street in the half dark, his new school shoes flashing orange as he kicks the soccer ball to me across the street. It’s Picture Day and Master Avery has required his new collarless shirt for the occasion. He wants to send cards to Nana and Poppy, Mimi and Charter, his cousin Kira. He’s written them each a little note, has spelled out the words all by himself. And he wants to include one of his watercolor drawings. And, and, and…

  And the bus is coming down the hill, its brights on, brakes hissing. I run my hands through Avery’s hair but he knocks them away. “Daaad!” When he climbs the vibrating steps, my boy doesn’t even use the rail for balance. His driver, Miss Rita, watches attentively, waving to me before letting the door close. As the big yellow bus pulls off, I wave at the blank windows, catching only a glimpse of Avery framed in the glass. He’s waving back but I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning. And then he’s gone.

  THE SLEEPWALKER

  JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

  In the last year of his life, my father unexpectedly started to sleepwalk again. In the middle of the night I’d hear his heavy footsteps on the creaking stairs, coming up to the third floor, where I lived in a room sealed most of the time with a heavy deadbolt. I heard him creep through the hallway and open the door to the spare room, diagonally across the hall from mine, and lay himself down in the guest bed. After a while he’d start to snore, and I’d know he was OK, at least until morning.

  When the dawn slanted through the small dormer window in the spare room, though, he’d sit up, confused and angry. “Goddamn it,” he’d say. “Where am I? What is this? What the hell am I doing here?”

  He didn’t know I was transsexual, or if he did, he never said anything about it. I’m not even sure he knew the word “transsexual” or the word “transgender,” and almost surely he could not have explained the difference between the two. But that’s all right. For a long time I couldn’t figure it all out, either.

  Once, though, when I was in high school, Dad and my mother were watching television, clicking through the channels, and for a moment they rested on a movie-of-the-week presentation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the scene in which Frank N. Furter waltzes around in fishnets singing, “Well you got caught with a flat. Well how about that?”

  My father raised an eyebrow and said, “There he is, Jim. Your biggest fan.”

  For a single, terrified second, I feared that he knew exactly what was going on in my room, up on the third floor, when the deadbolt was drawn. Was it possible, I wondered as Frank N. Furter danced before us, that from the very beginning my father had understood the thing that had lain in my heart, and that I had apparently so completely failed to conceal?

  My mother picked up the remote and we moved on to another movie. Kirk Douglas was standing in a sea of men in gladiator costumes. “I’m Spartacus!” the men shouted, one after the other. “I’m Spartacus!”

  My mother put the remote down. They loved movies about the ancient world, and I could understand why. My mother was Spartacus. My father was Spartacus. My drunken grandmother was Spartacus. Even Sausage, our gelatinous, over
weight Dalmatian, was Spartacus.

  In our house, sometimes, it seemed like just about everybody was Spartacus. Except me.

  On his fiftieth birthday, we gave my father an inflatable rubber boat. He spent the rest of that day in it, floating around the pool, with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other. I’d spent the morning in my third-floor room with the door locked, wearing my hippie girl clothes and reading The Feminine Mystique. Then, when it was time for the party, I changed back into boy clothes and helped carry the Hibachi grill and the beef patties and the charcoal and the cheese out to the pool, and I made my father a cheeseburger.

  He’d gotten his first melonoma in 1973, but the doctors had removed the mole in surgery. By the time he turned fifty, he’d been clear for five years, but a year later, in 1979, he had a second mole removed, beet in color. Then he was healthy for another six years, until the last mole. That time, they had to follow through with radiation, and interferon, and cisplatin. Too late, though.

  After his funeral, on Easter Sunday, 1986, as we followed the hearse through the rain, I thought back to the happy, sun-soaked occasion of his fiftieth birthday, just eight years before. We’d set up a stereo outside and played his favorite music for him. A couple of Beethoven symphonies and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. It was the first time in his life that my father seemed to understand the joys of a kick-ass stereo. He lay back in his boat with a look of complete peace as he listened to the Bach.

  You could see a place on his leg where they’d taken off the mole, and another on his back where they’d taken the skin to do the graft.

  When the fugue was over, Dad opened his eyes and said, sweetly, “Can we play it again? Louder?”

  Twenty-three years after that party, my children and my wife and I were sitting around the kitchen table, the four of us, eating dinner. I was mid-transition. My older son, Luke, gave me a look.