by Ethan Hawke
He arrived in Ohio two days later. My father was like that, dramatic. I had called back to tell him we were planning a small wedding at Saint Patrick’s cathedral in Cincinnati. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he’d said, firmly and immediately. Chance and my father were the only people I invited. Jimmy invited his mom, his stepfather—and some army friends from Albany, none of whom could come because they were on some field training exercise. He wasn’t too disappointed. He said he didn’t want a best man anyway. He wanted to stand alone.
We met my father and his new wife, BJ, at the restaurant inside the Ramada Inn where they were staying. Jimmy was on his best behavior; he can really be winning when he sets his mind to it. He spoke intelligently when addressed but for the most part he was quiet, standing beside me, watching my back.
My father and Jimmy had met once before back in Albany when I turned twenty-five. I’d only just started dating Jimmy a week earlier, but he stopped by this little party I was having and left early. I remember walking him down my driveway and kissing him good-bye on the hood of his car. “You know what I like about you?” I said, kissing him on the mouth. “You treat me like the piece of ass I am.”
I went back to the party and continued dancing with my dad. Jimmy told me later he’d found the party “depressing” because he didn’t feel anybody there knew me at all, including my father.
I could never explain to Jimmy the strange thing that happens to me whenever I see my father. Spontaneously, I seem to experience some kind of internal personality revolution. There are usually such time gaps between our meetings that I somehow revert to an idealized version of the person I was when we were last close. Essentially I become an adult manifestation of an eight-year-old. Each time we meet I try not to do it, but I always do. As a visit with my father approaches, I begin to dislike the person I’ve become and start wanting desperately to be that eight-year-old girl. The way I’ve done my hair will irritate me, and I’ll wind up with a ponytail. No earrings seem exactly right, so I go with none at all. My father has no idea who I am, and under the burden of his stare I don’t want him to know. I want his love and approval so badly it makes me hate him. And I don’t want to hate him, I want to love him. I need to tell him he’s gorgeous and I’m proud of him, and that need creates a thunder so loud I can’t hear anything else.
From the moment my father walked into the restaurant in Ohio I was reminded of what I dislike about him most: the way he dresses. He arrived wearing a suit that looked like he bought it at J. C. Penney’s in 1983. The man is not poor. He’s managed to save up quite a bit of money during the course of his public service life. He insists, however, on never buying new clothes. It’s easier to get him to give you ten thousand bucks than lend you a five-dollar bill.
You can smell Frank Walker’s masculinity from twenty paces. His shoulders, his jaw, his slightly receding hairline, are as male as the horns on the head of a ram. This man appears to be able to handle anything, from the subtlest emotional crisis to a barroom brawl.
Charging up through the restaurant, he gave me a great big hug and rubbed his hand across the bump in my belly. Instinctively I jerked away. We hadn’t seen each other for almost two years, but he always just moves ahead, oblivious to our estrangement.
“So you’ve elected to get married again, huh?” was the first thing he said to me.
The tension was obvious to Jimmy, BJ, and anyone else paying attention, but not to my father. Once we all sat down he launched in telling BJ an old boring anecdote about me.
“When Christy was seven years old, seven, I tell you”—like all politicians, he loves anecdotes—“she saunters up to me in my office and says, ‘Daddy, I been thinkin’ about it, and I just can’t decide whether I want to get married once or a whole bunch of times.’” He laughed. He neglected to mention the preface to that story, which was that I had come downstairs the night before and caught him sleeping with my baby-sitter, Janice.
His new wife, BJ, was as sweet as could be. My father claimed to be experimenting at marriage with a sane person. He’d been married four times before and dated numerous other women, but there was only one sane one in the bunch: my first stepmother, Estella. She was the best, twenty years old and a preschool teacher. I loved her. One time she sewed me an all-leather cowboy outfit complete with jacket, vest, and chaps—all with turquoise beaded dangling fringe.
Their marriage only lasted eight months. The day she left us she walked into our ranch-style house over on Norwood Avenue with both arms full of groceries. I was right behind her, carrying an azalea bush we’d just purchased. We came in to find my father whispering into the telephone. Immediately he hung up and turned around with a guilty look on his face.
“Who were you just talking to?” Estella asked.
“Iris Harding,” he blurted.
“Who is she?” Estella asked.
“Oh, uh, you know, she works over at Montgomery Ward.”
“Why were you talking to her?”
“Well, that’s a good question,” my father said, trying to stifle a smirk. Estella dropped the groceries to the floor and walked out the door, leaving me confused—but not my father. She returned six or seven weeks later with divorce papers in hand. It was not her intent to split up, however. She told him either to sign the papers or to promise never to sleep with another woman. She said she knew God could give him a clean slate, and she would try to do the same. My father said, “I truly do want to stay married to you—you are the best woman I’ve ever known—but in all candor if you’re adamant about the fidelity aspect of marriage then I am going to make you one miserable human being.” He always spoke that way, very formally, using the largest vocabulary possible.
I remember all this because I was sitting right there in between them on the blue sofa. Estella burst out crying, and my father signed the papers on top of the kitchen table. She was married to another man not a year later and had three sons, all of them blind. My father still insists she is the best woman he’s ever known. “She’s a saint,” he’d say, even in front of a new wife or girlfriend, “raisin’ those three blind boys. If I wasn’t such a child myself I coulda had a great life with her.”
BJ smiled politely. She was a few years younger than my father, maybe forty-eight, but attractive in a dignified fashion in her gray suit. The women in my father’s life all seemed interchangeable. I don’t know how, but even in his later years he managed to land tremendously fetching wives. BJ was no dummy either; she worked as head of marketing at the Alley, Houston’s largest theater.
“So what’s up, Beetle Bomper?” my father asked, still standing awkwardly in the center of the dining area.
He never did know how to talk to me. When I was a girl, he would ask me the most ridiculous questions in an attempt to communicate. “How do you feel about the hostages in Iran?” “Any opinions on Carter?” One time when we were backing out of the driveway, he ran over the neighbor’s kitten and didn’t even stop; he was too preoccupied. He also had this peculiar habit when I was little of putting out his hand for me to kiss. I don’t know where he got that; I’ve never seen any other man do it. He was only interested in a life of the mind, that and women and baseball. Manual labor reminded him of the town he was born in, Sawkill, Texas, and he hated Sawkill. “I have no patience for people uninterested or unwilling to learn. That whole goddamn town is full of people intolerant of tolerance,” he often said. His hands are almost disfiguringly large. They’re like Popeye’s forearms. Once you notice them you can’t stop staring. He seems old not because he’s fragile or sickly but more as a last remnant cut from an older, stronger, more intricate fabric than my generation. Inside of him lurks an explosive temper. He ripped the door off a refrigerator and even hit me on occasion, but more than anything else he simply frightened me.
But I will give Frank Walker this: He has been completely engrossed in life and did take custody of me at a time in Texas when single fathers
were even more uncommon than they are now. Granted, Grandmother put in a lot of time too.
“Thanks for inviting me,” he said across the table, after we sat down. His stare was like a punch in the face. The earnestness in his yellowing brown eyes was terrifying.
“Thanks for coming,” I mumbled uncomfortably, my own eyes immediately darting around the restaurant. At that moment I couldn’t remember why I’d asked him, but it had something to do with the idea that to start my new family I needed to be at peace with the old.
“You got your hands full with this one,” my father told Jimmy. “We were shopping in Neiman Marcus one time, and Christy—she couldn’t have been more than five—walks into the women’s department, runs over to the most expensive section, and starts rifling through dresses on the rack, swinging them over one at a time. Finally she finds one—she can barely lift the damn thing up—and says to me, ‘Daddy, this one. I need it.’ It had to be the most expensive goddamn dress in the whole mall, and it took her all of three minutes to find it.”
“Did you buy it for me, Daddy?” I asked rhetorically.
“Hell, no!” my father exclaimed. “Listen, Jimmy, this girl thought I could do anything. I remember one summer I got her a job working as a page in the capitol building over in Austin. We spent the whole summer living together in the Omni. That was a great summer, wasn’t it, Chris?”
“It was a Marriott,” I said, fastidiously refolding my napkin. All I remember of that summer was how hot it was and all the lonely hours I spent tooling around the halls of the air-conditioned hotel.
“Well, whatever. September’s rolling around and we’re each lying on our beds there in the room watching television, and she tells me she wants to be a page again next year. So I tell her, which of course she knew already, that children of congressmen only get one summer apiece. And she says, ‘Oh, Daddy, you and I both know that if you really wanted—I mean, if you really wanted—you’d find a way.’ ” He paused for dramatic effect. “She refused to believe I was a nobody.”
I’d heard my dad tell this story before and always found it peculiar that he loved it so much. I guess he thought it reflected well on him in some way, but I could never figure out how.
He kept asking Jimmy cliché questions like what did he think he was going to do with his life and how was he going to apply himself after the military? If I looked down at the salt and pepper shakers I could handle it; my father’s voice was even pleasant. Just the cadence of his speech brought back so many memories, letting me know the world doesn’t change that much. The sound of him made me want to sit in his lap but his eyes made me want to excuse myself and go to the bathroom.
“I brought you this book. I figured you’d remember it.” He lifted up an old worn green book I’d carried with me from ages eleven to fifteen almost without fail. “Emily Dickinson. You were a fanatic for Emily Dickinson. You remember that?”
“Of course,” I said, holding the weight of the book. Inside he’d written Just to let you know some things are always here. Love, Daddy. He always tried so hard to love me, I know he did, but even with that knowledge I’d find it almost impossible to reciprocate. Many people grow up without a father, but growing up without a mother is like being assigned a dunce cap. No matter how my father tried to compensate for that hollowness, he couldn’t.
“You’re very sweet, Daddy,” I said.
“Hell, I’m just glad to be invited this time.” He smiled, revealing that giant space between his teeth. Immediately he’d pissed me off again. I gave Jimmy an apologetic glance.
Part of why I’d hated him so much my whole life was somewhere deep down I did truly believe he could do anything he set his mind to, and it made me angry that there was so much with regard to me that he left undone. After a car accident that occurred while I was fifteen in a Trans-Am with some drunken older boys, I needed a blood transfusion. I believed one hundred percent that if he wanted to he could have healed me. I didn’t need to be in this doctor’s office getting hooked up to machines and heart monitors. He could’ve taken care of it, but for some reason he wouldn’t. On some core level I felt any misfortune I experienced was the direct result of his lack of attention.
As a girl I never felt outright anger, toward him or anyone. Mostly if things became uncomfortable I just wanted to be alone. Even when I left Texas, I didn’t leave feeling mad. I left feeling elated that there was finally some quiet around me. From the time I was seven I hated Texas and most of the people I met there. I would go to sleep early so I could dream more. My father would drive us along those interstates, and it seemed to me that all there was in Houston were highways and car dealerships. I wanted to run away, from the first time I heard of the concept, not because anything so dreadful was happening but because I craved solitude. My childhood was spent looking and waiting for a proper reason to run away, and when my father married Marilyn I found it. She told me I was the root cause of my father’s philandering, that a lot of men become sexually frustrated around a teenage daughter, so we’d all be better off if I left. Suited me fine. I’d saved up three thousand bucks scooping ice cream, and I took a plane to NYC. Of course, Tripp followed me, and I never got off to the start I wanted.
Unable to look my father in the eye as we all broke bread together there in the Ramada Inn restaurant, I realized I needed to develop some new coping skills. The tools I’d used to get through my childhood were advantageous and useful then but not anymore. Almost all my true enjoyment of people could take place only from a distance. Appreciating people was easy as long as they weren’t close: my father, especially. I’d learned to love him through separation, but I didn’t know how to communicate with him when he was right in front of me. It felt too dangerous. Being alone was the only time my breathing would come easy. In some ways I’d felt allergic to my own life. With people talking to me and wanting reactions from me, my head would swell and my skin would break out. Would that happen with my own child? Would I love my daughter when she was off at school but feel distant from her when she was in my arms? All my favorite memories didn’t seem to involve anybody else. Reading, walking down the street, taking the bus, washing my clothes—inside that kind of quiet peace I could feel and enjoy my life. After Jimmy and I broke up it was almost a relief. This way I would be able to love him forever; it would be easier. The habits I’d learned about how to survive all seemed to involve moving and solitude.
“Are you ever going to learn to sit still?” my father asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re a little fussbudget over there, squirming around.”
“You should talk,” I snapped.
“She’s excited and nervous, Frank,” BJ said warmly. “Leave her alone.”
“This one can’t sit still, Jimmy,” my dad said, pointing at me. “You’d better hold on tight to whatever handle you got, ’cause this one’s always on the move. I’ve been trying for years to keep up with her, but it seems like she doesn’t want to be caught up with—least not by me.”
“That’s not true,” I said, motioning for the waiter.
“You’re not an alcoholic, are you, Jimmy?” my father asked. Immediately my blood froze. I knew exactly where he was headed.
“No, man,” Jimmy said, smiling. “I don’t want to mislead you, I’m sure I have plenty of unflattering attributes, but I’m not a drunk.”
“You know about Tripp, though, right?” my father asked innocently.
I could have vomited right there on the table. Since the moment we’d arrived I could tell my father was hell bent on shoving my past into my face for me to smell.
“I know Christy’s been married before,” Jimmy said, his face taking on a more serious expression.
“Well, you never heard it from my point of view.” My dad grinned. “This guy was an L-O-S-E-R. I can say that, right, Chris?”
“You can say whatever you want.” I bit my
lip and braced myself. Look him in the eye, I told myself. Look him in the eye and tell him the truth doesn’t scare you. Tell him you are loved and you are not afraid.
If I could just bring my gaze to his and hold his stare, I thought, I could change the future. Someday, scientists will discover that our DNA is not some absolute unalterable code. There will be one link near the bottom of the ladder that twists or unwinds as our life proceeds. If I could reveal my core and look my father in the eye unashamed, it would thunder through the membranes of my body and his, leaving some microscopic genetic fragment permanently altered. My fear would be dissipated and courage would take its place. This shift, the result of one small action, could change my programming and even affect the hard-wiring of my child. I knew the only achievement I’d ever accomplish that would ever be worth a damn was the subtle growth or deterioration of my instinct. Like, can I look my father in the eye as he insists on telling my fiancé, my betrothed, the love of my life, what a loser I am?
“She wanted permission to marry this creep, OK? She was only seventeen, living with him in NYC—I mean, can you imagine? I come up to New York and visit them, OK? They’re living in the Algonquin Hotel ’cause they both have some fruity idea that they’re gonna be famous writers—” He stumbled. “Who was it who lived there?”
“Dorothy Parker,” I answered curtly. I never even liked Dorothy Parker.
“Now, Christy has some natural skills. This girl, one look at her even at the age of five, you could tell there was nothing she couldn’t achieve. She was a winner. She succeeded in everything she set out to do, but she didn’t think it was cool to be a winner. She thought it was cool to piss her life away. And this creep Tripp was like the champion urinator. You following me?”
I just held Jimmy’s hand under the table and studied the skin of his face. He had a slew of red whiskers, even though the hair of his head was black. For him, looking my father in the eye seemed to present no challenge.