by Ben George
But mostly, one wishes that one wasn’t one of these guys. But one is, and I am. I am fond of Brooklyn, for instance, even if I’ve never had enough money to live there. As I said, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a father, wasn’t sure I wanted to have a son. But now that my son is born, I do love him, a lot, more than anything, and I’ve been known to talk about it. For instance, I like to talk about the time I stayed up until four in the morning reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. By the time I finished the book (as everyone knows by now, The Road is a heartbreaking story about a father and a son who decide, since it’s the end of the world, that it would be a good time to take a long walk to the beach, and along the way they end up trying to avoid a whole bunch of people who want to eat them) I was weeping. Weeping and weeping. Weeping about what it means to have a son, to be a father, to be a man. So I got out of my bed, went into my son’s room, and climbed into bed with him. At which point he woke up, sat up in bed, looked at me, and said, “What are you doing in here?”
I didn’t answer him. But I didn’t get out of his bed, either. I just lay there for a while, thinking of the time, twelve years before, when my grandfather died and we (my family, but not my son, who hadn’t been born yet) had his funeral, and then buried him, and then gathered back at my grandfather’s house to drink and reminisce. This was in Connecticut. The house has been in my family for five generations. I went upstairs to change out of my funeral clothes and my dad was standing in the middle of the room (the whole upstairs is just one big room), halfway changed himself: he was in his underwear, and was still wearing his oxford shirt and tie and dress socks. He was crying. I don’t know about you and your dad, but when I see my dad crying I want him to stop, immediately. So I went over and hugged him, even though he wasn’t wearing any pants.
“Hey, don’t cry,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What for?” I said.
“I’ll never be as good a father to you as my father was to me.”
Now, this was news to me. I always thought my father was an excellent father, certainly way better than I deserved. When I was teenager, for instance, I got drunk and walked on a dozen cars parked on the street and got arrested and fined. Why I walked on the cars, I don’t know. The only reason I can come up with was that the cars were on the way from where I was to where I wanted to be. In any case, I was arrested and then released. Somehow I managed to keep the news from my dad for a couple of months, and by the time he found out, I was two states away—at my grandparents’ house in Connecticut, in fact. He called me on the phone, mid-afternoon, and told me I’d have to pay the fine (the bill for the fine was sent to him, which is how he found out about the whole thing). I told him I would. I made sure he knew I was ashamed. “Good,” he said. And that was about it. He didn’t even yell. But I knew how upset he was about the whole thing. I knew this because it was my grandmother’s birthday that day. My father normally called her around five to wish her happy birthday. But he didn’t call at five, or six, or seven. By seven thirty, I knew my grandmother had noticed, because she was watching Wheel of Fortune in a distracted, worried way. So I called my father and said, “Don’t forget to call Grandma. It’s her birthday.”
“Jesus,” my father said. “Thank you, Brock.” Which I thought was pretty incredible, since I’m the one who had gotten drunk and walked on the cars and gotten arrested and fined for it and caused my father to get so upset that he almost forgot to wish his own mother happy birthday. We hung up, and then my father called right back for his mother. After he did that, I got on the phone and he thanked me again and told me he loved me. That’s what I mean when I say he was a better father than I deserved.
I was thinking of this when my father apologized to me for not being as good a father to me as his father was to him. I couldn’t come up with one thing he’d done to me in his role as a father that he shouldn’t have, or one thing he’d done that he should have done significantly better. I thought maybe, in his grief, my father was confusing me with one of my two brothers. It’s possible they had a grievance that I didn’t. Once, for example, my father drove my youngest brother home from school. My youngest brother was young at the time, and maybe a little sensitive, although he insists he wasn’t sensitive now or at any other time, so apparently this—being accused of being sensitive—is one of the things he’s sensitive about. In any case, my father was driving him home, and decided to take a different route than the one they normally took. My youngest brother noticed and asked him, “Where are we going, Dad?”
My father didn’t answer for a second. Then he looked over at my youngest brother sitting in the passenger seat and said, in his best movie villain voice, “Lonnie, I’m not your real father.” My father claims not to know what he was thinking when he said this. But it was pretty funny. Everyone thought so, except for my youngest brother. Thinking about this now, it might have been this incident that made my youngest brother so sensitive in the first place. Thinking about this now, I seem to remember that my youngest brother, before my father jokingly told him he wasn’t his real father, was actually a tough little guy, like a prepubescent Edward G. Robinson but with curlier hair.
Anyway, when my dad was saying he had never been as good a father to me as his father had been to him, maybe he was really meaning to apologize to my youngest brother. I meant to mention this to my youngest brother after my dad had put on his pants and I had changed out of my funeral clothes and we had gone downstairs. But then we started drinking and someone told a story I’d never heard before, about my grandfather eating dry dog food and how nutty that was, and then there was an argument about whether it would have been nuttier if he’d eaten wet dog food, and then someone wanted clarification and asked, “You mean, with his hands?” and one thing led to another and I forgot to tell my youngest brother that our dad had probably been apologizing to him when he was apologizing to me. I only hope my mentioning it now, here, isn’t too late to do him some good.
It should be noted here that the guys who one wishes would stop talking about how they never wanted to become a father but are so glad they did fall into two camps. One camp is the camp filled with guys who never wanted to become fathers because their fathers were terrible and they were afraid they’d be terrible fathers to their sons, too. The stories coming out of that camp are much more interesting and dramatic than those coming out of the other camp, and therefore implausible, and I won’t talk more about them here. Because I’m clearly in the other camp, and here is my point: I wasn’t sure I wanted to have a son because I knew I wouldn’t be as good a father to him as my father had been to me. I hadn’t thought of that before my father brought up the subject, but once he did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thinking about it didn’t stop me from having a son (there are, of course, prophylactics that prevent guys like me from having sons; but if only there had been a prophylactic that prevented us from thinking about having sons and then talking about it, we’d all be a lot better off), but it did stop me from enjoying the prospect. I worried about it for years, long before I had a son. I read John Edgar Wideman’s terrifying stories and essays about his son going to prison for murder, and I worried about that, worried that somehow I would drive my son to prison (I mean this both figuratively and literally: sometimes, in my nightmares, I actually would drive my son to the prison gates and he would get out of the car and wave to me, like I was just dropping him off at school or camp or the mall, before walking through the gates and having them clang shut behind him), all because I was not as good a father to my son as my father had been to me.
Whatever it was, I knew something would happen. I was terrified of it. I really was. I even mentioned this to my father. This was maybe three years before my wife was even pregnant. I don’t know how the subject came up. It probably didn’t. I probably just blurted it out. I told him how afraid I was to become a father. I was afraid I’d hurt my son, somehow, in some way, and wreck his life. My father looked at me like I was a lunatic.
“You can’t be scared of something that doesn’t even exist,” he said. This, of course, is a ridiculous thing to say. But I knew then that this was another way I wouldn’t be as good a father to my son as my father had been to me. I would worry about things that I shouldn’t. I would talk about things that didn’t need to be talked about (my father, for instance, uttered that one sentence on the subject of his father and him and me, and only that one sentence, that one time). I would make things worse just by talking about them. I was one of those guys. Please, I said to whoever was listening when I found out my wife was pregnant, please don’t let me be one of those guys.
My son was born. He was beautiful. I loved him. I held him in the hospital. I held him at home. I held him, and waited.
I waited a year, maybe a little bit more. We were moving, from South Carolina to Ohio. I remember this because there were boxes everywhere. My son was in his high chair. He was shirtless, because he hated bibs and we didn’t want him getting his shirt all dirty. I was feeding him. When I say I was feeding him, I don’t mean I was putting food on a spoon and then putting it in his mouth. I mean I was handing him a banana and he was supposed to put the banana in his mouth. This was my understanding of how one-year-olds were supposed to eat their food. My son had another understanding, though. He kept taking the banana and throwing it on the floor. The floor around the high chair was covered with a tarp for this very reason. Still, it made me mad. My son must have thrown the banana on the floor ten, twelve, fifteen times. My wife was in the other room, packing boxes. But she could hear me telling our son, “No. No. No. Do not do that.”
“Is everything all right in there?” she wanted to know.
I didn’t answer. I picked the banana up off the floor and handed it to my son. With my eyes I told him, “You know what to do with this. You know what I expect you to do with this.”
My son broke the banana in two. He looked me in the eyes. With his left hand he threw the smaller, squishier part of the banana down and off to the side a little; it landed on an open box of dishes, smearing the top dish. With his right hand he threw the other, bigger, more solid part of the banana at me. It hit me right in the chest, then rolled down my T-shirt and into my lap. I picked it up with my right hand. I looked at my son. He was looking back at me. His eyes were big and happy. I could see how happy he was. And then I threw the banana back at him. Hard. It hit him right in the chest, and made a loud noise, a big, wet, painful-sounding smack. “What was that?” my wife wanted to know from the next room. I didn’t answer. She’d find out soon enough, when my son started crying and she came into the room and I told her what I’d done and she saw the red banana-shaped mark on his white, white chest. But before that happened, it was just my son and me. He was sitting in his high chair, me in my low one. My son’s mouth was hanging open, but he wasn’t crying yet. He was still looking at me with his big eyes, but they weren’t happy anymore. Maybe he was seeing what I was seeing. Maybe he was seeing the time, years and years later, when I’d be apologizing for not being as good a father to him as my father had been to me. And my son would remember the banana. He would remember it because I was one of those guys who would talk about it, endlessly, as part of the story of my journey from not being sure I wanted to be a father to not knowing what I’d do without my son. My son would remember the banana, and when I said to him, “I’ll never be as good a father to you as my father was to me,” he would think, and maybe even say, “You know, maybe you won’t.”
So that was the answer to my son’s question, when he woke up to find me crying in his bed after reading The Road and asked me, “What are you doing in here?” I was saying I was sorry. I was saying I was sorry that I’m so much like those guys we all hate, instead of being more like my father. I was saying I was sorry for not being as good a father to him as my father is to me. I was saying I was sorry for denying him a chance to plausibly deny the truth of that statement. I was saying I was sorry for throwing that banana at him six years earlier. I was promising never ever to do anything like that again. Except I wasn’t brave enough to say any of those things. Finally, I was speechless. Instead, I kissed my son on the forehead, climbed out of his bed, and went back to my own.
THE POINTS OF SAIL
SVEN BIRKERTS
The nerve of fathering is woven through the moment—and here and now is the place to start. Late July of 2008, Cape Cod. We have come down almost every summer for the last twenty years. This time we are staying in Truro, my wife Lynn, our son Liam and his friend Caleb, and I. Our daughter Mara will take a few days off from her job next week to join us, arriving when Caleb leaves. There will be three days when we are all four together, the basic unit, taken for granted for so many years, but now become as rare as one of those planetary alignments that I no longer put stock in. This, though, I do put stock in. The thought of us all reassembled reaches me, wakes me with the strike of every blue ocean day.
It’s mid-afternoon and I’m in Provincetown, sitting on a deck on the bayside, at one of those rental spots. Liam and Caleb have persuaded me to rent two Sunfish sailboats so that they can sail the harbor together. Caleb has been taking sailing lessons all summer at home, and Liam had some a few years back, though as was clear as soon as they launched out ten minutes ago, he has forgotten whatever he learned. As Caleb’s boat arrowed toward the horizon, Liam’s sat turned around with sails luffing, and I watched his silhouette jerking the boom and tiller this way and that until at last he got himself repointed and under way. I was smiling, not much worrying about the wisdom of letting him out in his own boat—he’s fourteen and as big as I am—though I did take note of a smudge of dark clouds moving in behind me.
Once Liam joined up with Caleb, the two little Sunfish zigged and zagged for the longest time in the open area between the long pier and the dozens of boats anchored in the harbor and I fell into a kind of afternoon fugue watching them. The book I’d brought lay facedown on the little table where I sat. I tracked the movement of the boats and half listened to two men behind me talking about the perils of gin and various hangover remedies, and every so often I stood up to stretch and to glance up at the sky. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I panned left along the shoreline, past the clutter of waterfront buildings and pilings toward Truro and Wellfleet.
I don’t remember what year we first started coming to the Cape regularly. We had been down once or twice for shorter visits before we had kids. Massachusetts was still new to us—Lynn and I are both Midwesterners—and going to the ocean felt like an adventure, a splurge. Fresh seafood, bare feet in the brine. What a sweet jolt to the senses it all was. And isn’t this one of the unexpected things about getting older: suddenly remembering not just the specifics of an event, but the original intensity, the fact of the original intensity?
Those first times have mostly slipped away, replaced—overruled—by the years and years, the layers and layers, of family visits. The place, which is to say the places—the many rental spots in Wellfleet and Truro, including some fairly grim habitats early on—has become an archive of family life. Driving along Route 6 in either direction, I have only to glance at a particular turnoff to think—or to say out loud if Lynn is beside me—“that was the place with the marshy smell,” or whatever tag best fits.
All of which is to say that this whole area, everything north of the Wellfleet line—which for me is marked by the Wellfleet Drive-In—is dense with anecdote. I have this storage box with its twenty-plus years of excerpts, all of them from summer, all from vacations away from our daily living and therefore of a kind, a time line separate from everything else. “That first summer we…” Except that memory obeys not time lines, but associations. Shake the photos in the box until they are completely pell-mell, then reach in. That dark path by the Bayside rental fits right next to the place with the horses, and that in turn fits next to the field where we threw Frisbees. Like that. So when I shade my eyes and follow the shoreline, I am not so much seeing the things in front of me as pointing myself b
ack. I am fanning the pages of a book I know, not really reading, just catching a phrase here, another there.
But now I turn again, I look across the tables on the deck and over the railing and out along the line described by the pier to my right. I see the two Sunfish, Caleb’s with the darker sail heeling nicely into the wind, cutting toward the open water past pier’s end, Liam’s lagging, not quite right with the wind, but at least making headway. And I check over my shoulder to see how the clouds have gained, feeling a first tiny prick of anxiety. The boat rental people said the bay just past the pier was fine, but they also said they were a bit shorthanded today, that they wouldn’t be taking their boat out quite as much to patrol. This flashes back to me as I see Caleb’s boat slip out of sight behind the end of the pier, though I find that when I sit up straight I can follow the top part of his blue sail—accompanied, some distance behind, by Liam’s, which is red.