by Faith Salie
That’s how I found myself, one night between seventh and eighth grade, wide awake and frozen with fear. I was sitting in our living room, in the dimmest light, after my whole family had gone to bed. I’d just finished The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a summer read prescribed to me by my father, the doctor of philosophy. I’d requested this assignment, because I wanted to demonstrate I was ready to matriculate to reading “literature” from reading Sweet Valley High, and so my father suggested some Gothic psychological horror. Even though its terrifying last sentence left me unable to move, I couldn’t wait till the next morning to tell my dad I’d actually been able to follow James’s seemingly infinite clauses to the end of his eternal sentences.
“Dad, I finished it last night. Oh my GOSH. You didn’t warn me!”
His eyebrows shot up in delighted cahoots. “How about that ending, huh?”
And we parsed the ending and what it could mean, and our discussion concluded with my asking, “What do I read next?”
He gave me a Jane Austen anthology, and I fell for Elizabeth Bennet—granted, as clichéd a rite of passage for a bookish teenager as buying your first tube of Clearasil, but nonetheless a love affair. When I mentioned I liked e. e. cummings, mostly due to my adolescent admiration for his f u to capitalization, Dad found a cummings collection. He didn’t judge my nascent taste. I think of how he must have driven his pimpy-looking Chrysler New Yorker to the bookstore to buy his daughter a book of poetry; I think of him inscribing it with his pointy penmanship and asking Mom to wrap it for me as a gift.
I feel like I bonded with my father through words and writing and books from the beginning of my life, since the rat-a-tat-tat of his typewriter lulled me to sleep as a little girl. He was writing his PhD draft, and the syncopated beat of its composition connected me to him in the way that the swishing rhythm of the womb attunes a baby to her mother. Our cadence was not without interruption, however. Once, when I was sleepily singing “Rubber Ducky” to the backup drumming of his typewriter keys, my dad came into my room and asked me to be quiet. That kind of bummed me out. Then again, there are a few things my dad did that I wouldn’t do, such as smoke Marlboro reds while driving his family around in a sealed Chinook camper, playing a Roger Whittaker eight-track.
He was pursuing his doctorate while teaching English at the public high school he’d attended a decade before. Very Welcome Back, Kotter. (If this reference is lost on you, try to imagine a time when John Travolta had a lot of hair that was real.) He was writing a treatise on the beginnings of women’s education at the Harvard Annex, which became Radcliffe College. He did this at night, probably after grading thirty-five essays on the grooviness of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. My dad was the son of two humble people who never made it past tenth grade. He worked hard to achieve his advanced degrees, even harder than he’d worked to lose his Boston accent.
As a toddler, I liked to help him get dressed for work, in the dark, rushed hours of the morning. It made me feel important, especially when I got to pick out his socks. This meant he occasionally discovered he was wearing two different-colored socks while presenting himself as an authority figure to students not much younger than he was. One morning, outfitted by moi in a double-breasted blazer, tight tattersall bell-bottoms, and a yellow clip-on bow tie, he no doubt swaggered into his first period AP English class. He had a lot going on with such a getup, and I’m sure he’d also paid some attention to his longish hair and beard-mustache combo. He must have taken a moment to smooth his sideburns. That his copious hair situation surely took some of his focus will become meaningful in a moment.
On this particular day, he was teaching Thoreau’s Walden. He led a discussion about how Thoreau ventures out to the frozen middle of Walden Pond to commune with the great eye in the sky. The marks Thoreau chips into the ice create a kind of cross. My father, who probably should have been an actor, wanted to dramatize the symbolism of Thoreau’s excursion. So he turned his back to the class, unbuttoned all four hundred buttons on his double-breasted blazer, and flung his arms out in cruciform as he spun abruptly around.
A girl in the front row let out a little scream.
His fly was wide open.
The bell rang. My father bolted to the vice principal’s office before any traumatized teenagers could get there first. He confessed to Vice Principal Piccirilli that he’d exposed himself to his class in the name of literary symbolism. He explained that inviting his three-year-old daughter to be his stylist early in the morning meant he sometimes missed a step, like zipping his pants.
Evidently, my father was so passionate about literature that sometimes he literally couldn’t contain himself.
Upon request, my father will tell this story. I love hearing it, a little bit because I’m the guest star, but mostly because I like seeing him come alive as he falls back into teacher mode and reenacts his Thoreau lecture. He left that profession before I entered first grade, but I know he was an inspired teacher, because he basically taught me. As he drove me to afternoon auditions and rehearsals, he’d hold book club on wheels. When I was reading The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, my father would ask me questions like, “What does it mean for Hester to remove her cap and let her hair fall?” We’d discuss Puritanism and its effect on women. “Why do you think Hester’s love child’s name is Pearl?” We’d talk about how a pearl is made—a natural irritation, something accidentally lodged into the belly of the oyster that grows into a wild jewel. Suddenly I appreciated Hawthorne’s genius. Perhaps the great Nate gets a little obvi when it comes to assigning symbolic names to other characters, like gloomy DIMmesdale and the villainous CHILLINGworth, but high school sophomores should thank him for throwing them a bone across the centuries.
I had a different high school English teacher who showed far less faith in my literary comprehension than my father did. Great Expectations marked my first encounter with Dickens in more ways than one: I had my own great expectations that Mrs. Altman was going to appreciate my essay on the novel. I worked on it all weekend, crafting the requisite five paragraphs. I was really proud of this paper, not only because I used a thesaurus to learn the word incarceration, but also because my dad read it before I turned it in and told me I’d done a good job. When Mrs. Altman handed out graded essays to everyone but me and asked if I’d see her after class, I wondered if she wanted to congratulate me personally on the deployment of my new sparkle word. Instead, she informed me she detected the strong odor of CliffsNotes in my writing.
When I came home from school and told my dad he should expect a call from my English teacher, he appeared simultaneously pissed and proud. It never crossed his mind to ask me if I’d cheated. He was far more pleased to express to Mrs. Altman his steadfast confidence in me than he was even to disabuse her of the insane notion that his home might be infested with CliffsNotes. I remember the serious eagerness with which he awaited her call. I heard him greet my teacher in a low, measured tone. I followed him as he walked upstairs with the gigantic cordless phone to my parents’ bedroom. He had a glint in his eye as he shut the door and cleared his throat. The next day, Mrs. Altman mutely handed me a paper marked with nothing but a scarlet letter A and then lectured the class on plagiarism. Maybe he told her she shouldn’t be surprised if she’d been impressed with my paper.
I astonished no one by ultimately choosing to study literature in college and grad school. My linear seventeen-year-old mind had, at first, decided that, because I wanted to continue acting, I should study theater in college. Rejected by all the best schools to which I applied, I majored in drama at my “safety school” and hated every minute of it. Freshman year, I went home for Thanksgiving, feeling anything but grateful, complaining to my parents that I wasn’t learning what I wanted to in college. I had to take classes where professors taught me things like how to pronounce words like “Tuesday” with a “liquid U”: “tee-yew-sday.” This comes in handy only if you order tuna salad a lot. One midterm involved lip-synching so
mething from The Little Mermaid. I was Ursula, and I killed, but it wasn’t enough for me. Dad suggested, simply, “Why don’t you apply to Harvard?” That idea, that school, had never occurred to me. I thought I was too artsy; I also thought I’d never get in, since several of Harvard’s Ivy League sisters had turned me down. But I applied, and I did get in. I was more surprised than my dad.
I embraced Victorian literature as a transfer student. When I called my father to inform him I’d finally finished Bleak House, and that he was right, it was just about the greatest novel ever, he sounded so gratified. “Oh, just wait till you read Our Mutual Friend,” he said, keeping our book club going.
One day, as I was researching a paper on suffragettes in the Schlesinger Library in Radcliffe Yard, I stumbled across my father’s dissertation. I held in my hand the book that had provided the soundtrack of my earliest youth. It was small and fat. I flipped to the back to see how many people had checked it out over a decade and a half. Hardly anyone, which I decided not to tell him. I wondered, as I flipped through its dusty pages and regarded its old-fashioned font, did my dad ever dream his daughter might grow up to be a part of the place he wrote about? Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t, but I felt like my presence in that library that day, holding his book, made me its coda.
In grad school, in England, I ventured beyond my father’s canon. Fired up by my college-bred feminism, I read everything that Virginia Woolf ever wrote, just as she was meant to be read: in Doc Martens. I traveled, not just through stories, but by planes and trains, even on camels and elephants, to places my father had never been.
When I returned from overseas, it was time for me to give him a book.
You see, not long after I came back, Mom died. We didn’t have much time to figure out what to say at her funeral. We’d known she was dying, but who prepares the right words in advance? I bookmarked a passage in Virginia Woolf’s posthumous essay collection, Moments of Being. I gave lines to my father that Woolf had composed about losing her mother. He read them at my mother’s service. He read them carefully, but with no less passion than he’d once used to inspire his students.
The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should rather say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.
Then and now, the first image in my head of my mother is always of her emphatic signature move. She’d clap her hands together and hold them, clasped, as she shook her head with a big toothy smile. She was so liberal with this gesture that it’s a wonder you always felt special for having produced such delight.
I have lived now almost twenty years without my mother’s effusion. No one and nothing has replaced it. Nevertheless, I’ve navigated my last decades fueled by the reserves of both her ebullience and my father’s early confidence in me. When I want to impress him now, I text him something his grandchildren have accomplished, like “Developmental Milestone Alert: Augustus now takes responsibility for his own mucus!”
Dad still speaks to me through books. He sent a couple to our first and only baby shower, books with a very clear message.
Our baby shower was a “book shower.” David and his husband, Mark, offered to throw us a party and suggested this theme, knowing my aversion to traditional baby showers. I’m not so into the all-lady guest lists and the “cakes” made out of diapers. I hate diaper cakes. I hate them because anything that looks like a tiered white cake should be delicious and not made of something to absorb human waste. And I didn’t want to do that thing where you murder the momentum by making folks sit in a circle while you open every single present and hold up each onesie and stick out your bottom lip to make that faux sad look that says, “Y’ALL. This is so ADORABLE it’s actually making me DIE.”
But the book shower idea—that changed everything. Because a pregnant approval junkie wants to have a baby shower that is unique and also gay. No one appreciates how hard it is to make a baby more than men who love men. My brother and brother-in-law showered us in a Chelsea loft. This party was basically a bevy of beautiful boys bearing books like The Paper Bag Princess. At this shower, it was raining men and books, two of my favorite things. It looked like a Dewey Decimal–themed tea dance on a gay cruise.
My father sent literary emissaries to the shower for “AC,” as he sometimes calls our boy: Moby Dick and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are beautiful hardbound editions with leather covers. He dedicated the Melville with, “Augustus—Bon Voyage!” And the Joyce, “Augustus—Become your own work of art.” Granted, I don’t think the kid will be reading those soon—at least not until I start prepping him for kindergarten interviews. But I know why my dad sent those books to his preborn grandson and wrote those words. He’s saying something by gifting his two favorite pieces of literature, rather than some Dr. Seuss. What he’s saying is that I’m an old mom, which means my dad is an even older grandfather, which means he may not be alive when his grandson cracks the classics. After he’s gone, my father wants to be there somehow for Augustus.
Those books sit on the kids’ bookshelf, unopened. I pray my dad will be around when Augustus reads them. But if he’s not, which is not unlikely, I hope that my father’s grandson will appreciate the pointy handwriting of the inscription. I hope the boy, probably by then a young man, will feel the confidence that his grandfather had in him, that he would grow to appreciate the legacy of words with their ready-to-be-unearthed meanings.
Now my father’s daughter has written a book of her own. Now that I’m a grown woman, I’ll be just fine if he’s more surprised than impressed.
This is how it happens.
We are walking down the street as a family—at least one of us is wearing a kid, and John has his dog on a leash. A stranger walking toward us takes notice and smiles our way.
“What a beauty! So sweet!” the stranger coos.
I think the stranger has excellent taste. Until I notice s/he is talking about Korbin the dog and not a human-child. S/he bends down to continue the conversation with the animal.
“Are you a gooooood big brother? I bet you aaaaaarrrrrre…!”
My husband smiles. He and the stranger are now instantly familiar, because they are “Dog People.” They talk about breeds and “rescues” and unconditional love. I blink. I stare. I cry (in my head), MY HUSBAND’S DOG IS NOT MY KIDS’ BROTHER.
The main reason that my husband’s dog is not my kids’ brother is that my children are Homo sapiens with opposable thumbs, and the dog is a Canis lupus who eats his own vomit. Korbin was born covered in fur; Augustus and Minerva were born covered with vernix and meconium, respectively. Other noteworthy differences:
• Dogs smell. If it rains on my children, their scent does not induce gagging.
• Dogs don’t talk. Yes, they communicate, but they do not form words to ask interesting questions like, “Do dinosaurs have nipples?”
• While it is true that, like dogs, babies need their poop cleaned up, this only lasts about two years. Even if I throw Dog People a bone and calculate poop in dog years, that’s like fourteen years of dealing with my children’s ordure versus approximately eighty-four years of putting a plastic bag over your hand and wrapping it around soft, warm dog shit.
Let me get this over with: I think animals are great, dogs in particular. Dogs bring many people joy. A dog can lower its owner’s blood pressure. (Since I’m not Korbin’s owner, he raises my blood pressure, especially when he barks at anyone he doesn’t like and everyone he does like.) And reportedly, all the disgusting dander and fur that constantly accumulates in my home is good for the children’s immune systems. Dogs can sniff out cancer! A dog dialed 911!!
So dogs are wonderful creatures. I would think yours is adorable
. I just don’t want one. Besides the fact that, scientifically speaking, their mouths are NOT cleaner than humans’, here are a few reasons why:
• I like privacy. You’re never alone when you have a dog. At least kids go to school for part of the day. Dogs are always around. If you forget they are around, they will remind you or your nose.
• Name one thing convenient about having a dog. Dogs are a significant responsibility if you are a decent owner and offer them food, exercise, and grooming. Small children require even more caretaking, but all your efforts pay off eventually. Not so with dogs. Dogs will never help you match socks out of the dryer or thank you in their valedictory remarks or announce that they just made a heart-shaped poop because they “love you so much.”
• Your husband takes his dog out every morning while you deal with children by yourself—kids who resist your a.m. administration of probiotic powder until it looks like you’ve all gone on a coke binge.
• Your husband takes the dog out for the nighttime walk, pipe in hand, instead of spending time with you, watching the DVR backlog of Downton Abbey, during the precious forty-five minutes between both children down and your bedtime.
• Hairy dog penises I didn’t ask to see.
Oh, how I tried to want one, or at least want someone else’s. When I met John, he had two dogs—Louisiana Catahoula leopard dogs, to be exact. Korbin and Maggie (RIP). I loved John, so I really tried to love his dogs. That didn’t work, so I tried to like them. I settled for tolerating their hair all over my everything and accepting the fact that while I was in John’s bed, they were allowed to sleep on John’s bed. They were fine dogs, mostly annoying insofar as their existence meant that John could never, ever stay at my apartment and I always, always had to pack up and spend the weekend at John, Korbin, and Maggie’s apartment. I would pet them and talk to them and go on walks with John and the Catahoulas. One time, when John was sick in bed, I became the world’s best girlfriend by offering to take ancient Maggie out and pick up her business. She ran a loose business, so I almost threw up. Then I was almost run over, because she let it go in the middle of the street, and the taxi drivers were not happy waiting for me to scoop up crap that technically belonged to my boyfriend.