This is one of the few things that my mother and I have in common: my relationship with my father is not what I’d expected. Her relationship with him is not what she’d expected. I figured he’d do fatherly things: ineptly change a diaper, teach me how to ride a bike, and get tearful as I left for college. (Admittedly, I stole most of these ideas from a life insurance commercial. They sound like things dads do, right?) And Mom? Well, she probably expected her marriage to last longer than the Reagan administration.
None of that happened. Dad turned out to be a very different creature than either of us expected. Less sentimental. More serious. Crankier. That’s not to say there isn’t something valuable in knowing him. You just have to be willing to look. Very, very closely. For decades.
My parents were married for eight inexplicable years, four of them spent on separate continents. Mom told me that she knew her marriage was over around the time I was born. No blame was ever assigned to this sentiment, and looking at the two of them now, it’s hard to regard their split as anything but inevitable. I was a catalyst, but not the cause—my beginning marked their end.
They separated shortly afterward and divorced when I was four. I don’t remember a time when they were ever together, an act of mercy by my infant brain. Imagining them as a couple would be like describing the flavor of violin music.
“Oh, but opposites attract,” people often tell me. Yes, they do.
There is something to be said for finding someone who is everything you are not. But my parents are not opposites. Their radical differences do not fall in line in a diametric, corresponding way. We aren’t dealing with black and white, with left and right. We are dealing with black and the theory of relativity, with left and a hazy memory from your fifth birthday party.
My father is organized and regimented. He has zero tolerance for nonsense or the unexplained. He likes reading nonfiction, usually about history or war, and he spends a lot of time meticulously constructing highly accurate, fully functional model airplanes. My mother reads book chapters out of order (“I like to skip around”) and starts decorating for Halloween in August. Dad’s closet is full of several iterations of the exact same shirt, neatly pressed. There is a decent chance my mother is harboring a fugitive in hers.
Rand often talks about what a miracle it is that I am alive at all, explaining that there is nothing more unlikely than the second child of a highly improbable marriage. I try not to question it (if I do, I’m afraid I’ll disrupt something in the space-time continuum and will run the risk of disappearing, like Marty McFly almost did in Back to the Future). Still, curiosity sometimes gets the better of me, and whenever I ask my mom about those early years of courtship, the answers are less romantic than I would like.
I don’t want to traumatize you.
It wasn’t, like, a bad relationship. Times were different then.
He kept bringing me coffee.
I don’t know how that happened.
I think I was depressed.
Don’t write this shit down.
Conclusion: Rand’s right. I’m a goddamn miracle. Simply by virtue of existing I have achieved something. I often sit around and contemplate this simple but profound truth: I am. Then I go eat a piece of cake while still in my pajamas at 3 p.m., because no day is wasted when you are this improbable.
My parents met in Rome while my father was doing work for the US Department of Defense. He and his colleagues in the CIA and US intelligence would hang out in the hotel where my mother worked, across the street from the American embassy. The place was often filled with minor celebrities and oil barons and debutantes, as well as a handful of governmental operatives.
My father’s work has always remained murky to us. He told my mother he was a translator for the Department of Defense. She began to suspect that was not the entirety of his role sometime into their marriage when she uncovered a stack of IDs with different names buried deep in his dresser. (It didn’t stop either of them from relaying this as my father’s profession to my brother and me. As kids, we understood that he had a droll desk job that involved transcription and translation and little else.) In recent years, I’ve tried to pry stories out of my dad. I get pieces here and there—not enough to paint a full picture, but enough to know that I don’t know enough.
My mother always claimed with a measure of pride that back when they first met at the hotel, she always knew exactly what the operatives were up to. My father disagrees. I don’t know who is correct, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Mom was right: she has always been pretty enough to be a risk to national security. Helen may have launched a thousand ships, but I’m fairly certain Mom played a pivotal if uncredited role in the Cold War.
She was fifteen years his junior; he’d already been married and divorced once, with one son from his previous union—my half-brother, Greg. My parents were married in the consulate in Rome, and the reception was two days later because Dad couldn’t get an entire day off work, not even to get married.
I look at their wedding album with the same esteem and wonder one would reserve for a photo of actor Patrick Stewart (a.k.a, Captain Jean-Luc Picard) with a full head of hair—it is concrete evidence of something that shouldn’t be. But there they are, standing among the ruins of the Roman Forum, younger than I would ever know them to be. He spoke half a dozen languages and went by half a dozen names. She was the most beautiful woman in Rome. When I think of it in those terms, it almost makes sense.
Soon after they were married, my father was reassigned to his beloved Munich, and so they headed to Germany, where my brother Edward was born. Nearly four years later, Mom left for America while pregnant with me. She said it was because she hadn’t enjoyed the birthing process on the military base where my dad was stationed and had heard good things about American hospitals, but I don’t think she had any intention of ever returning to Europe.
And so I became the first person in my immediate family to be born in America and one of only three cousins born here.
Dad hung around for a few months, waiting for my mom to be ready to return to Germany, but she never was. Nor was he willing to stay in the United States, when his home and work were in Munich. So he went back to Germany alone.
We saw him once a year for about a month at a time. The visits became less frequent as I got older. I only saw him once between the ages of ten and fifteen, and then again when I was seventeen, and once more when I was nineteen.
I was fairly accepting of his scarcity, as the remoteness seemed in line with my father’s temperament. He’s doesn’t like being close to people either literally or figuratively and isn’t particularly sentimental or patient. Neither children, nor teenagers, nor people in general are his thing.
Once, one of my little cousins made the mistake of throwing his small arms around him in a hug, and he was immediately scared away with a booming “GET OUT.”
When I gently chided him for this, he replied, “I didn’t like my own children, so why the hell would I like anybody else’s?”
This is, I suppose, a rather harsh thing to say to your daughter under any circumstances. But we happened to be in the middle of a dance floor.
At a wedding.
My wedding.
It was during the father-daughter dance, a tradition that I had endeavored to avoid until my father walked up to me and said, “I need to dance with you.” I, delighted, told him that I had no idea he had wanted to. “I don’t,” he said, gesturing to a table of family members, “but they tell me I have to.”
Yeah.
Here is the truly remarkable thing: I do not take these things personally. My father was born in the Ukraine during Stalinist rule. On the day before he and his mother and younger brother were supposed to be sent to the gulag, the Nazis took Kiev. In the ensuing shit-show, my grandmother managed to lie low and eventually made her way across Europe with her family. Still in her twenties but already long a widow, she’d be married and widowed again by the end of the war (her second and last hus
band is where we get our last name). My father’s earliest childhood memories are of trekking across a continent at war, of losing two father figures, and of literally Hitler.
So, yeah, he’s not great at parties.
I’ve learned to cut him some slack. This isn’t how my father treats me. This is how my father treats life. His grumpiness is not brought on by circumstance but is simply his constant state of being. For a partial catalog of things that irritate him, you need to simply consult a complete set of unabridged encyclopedias or the entirety of the Internet (which he also hates). There is only one thing he seems to like, though he complains nearly nonstop about it as well—his dog, a snorting, fat little pug named Anton.
Every damn letter he writes to me is filled with talk of that dog. Sometimes he even sends me pictures. Not of Dad and Anton, or my stepmother Margit and Anton, but of just Anton.
Therein lay the revelation that as his daughter I so desperately needed: proof that my father can love something and display nothing but vexation for it. He ceased to be as much of an enigma after that. It dawned on me that I had even done a rather brilliant if unintentional impersonation of my father throughout my teen years. I hated everything. Even the things I loved.
This acceptance of mine has been hard-won. Hours spent watching sitcoms during my formative years left me with a clear idea of how fathers should be: kind, caring, inclined to wearing sweater vests, and played by either Michael Gross or Alan Thicke. I wished for a father who didn’t get so frustrated with the world. Someone who could accurately be described as kindly and affectionate. Someone who replied to my jokes with something other than “What the hell is wrong with you?”
But that’s not my father. And if I kept focusing on what he isn’t, I would never see him for what he is: honest, if painfully so, brilliant, and generous. Surprisingly easygoing when it came to his expectations of me. He’s never demanded love or affection or even a thank you. He’s never demanded anything, really, except for an occasional reply to the letters he has sent—and still sends—regularly.
He supported my brothers and me through childhood and college, never grousing about finances. He questions all my small decisions—my clothing, my hairstyles, my choice in reading materials—but never the big ones like my career (specious though it is) or my husband. He expresses his approval with a simple “Fine.”
“Dad, I love you.”
“Fine.”
“Are you and Rand having kids?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“Fine.”
And in my father’s world, “Fine” is about as good as you can get.
I suppose our relationship is fairly unorthodox, but let’s be honest, most relationships are. Besides, it’s only ever an issue on Father’s Day, when I spend the better part of an hour looking through greeting cards, none of which apply to my dad. Hallmark acknowledges only those fathers who golf or fish, those who are terrible at grilling steaks and spend hours watching professional sports on TV. There are no cards that read, “Thanks for supporting me through college and never directly disputing your paternity.”
Which is a shame, because I bet they could make a killing on that one.
It turns out, sometimes you just have to accept people for who they are. Trust me, it’s certainly less exhausting. I can spend my time with my dad feeling disappointed, or I can spend it trying to understand the man who was partly responsible for my unlikely existence. It becomes an easy decision when you look at it that way. What is truly remarkable is how very far you will go for that understanding.
WHEN I WAS IN HIGH school, part of the required reading for one of our classes was a book titled Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius and His Really Fucking Boring Clock by Dava Sobel.
To be fair, it’s been a few years since I’ve read it, so I might have the author wrong.
I should now, in the interest of coherency, tell you what the book is about. I’m sorry to do this to you.
It’s the tale of John Harrison, a British clockmaker who was determined to figure out how to tell a ship’s exact location at sea. In the early eighteenth century, seafaring vessels were frequently lost or ended up woefully off course. Annoyed by this, Parliament passed the Longitude Act in 1714, offering twenty thousand pounds (millions of dollars by today’s standards) to the first person who could find a method for accurately detecting longitude while at sea to an accuracy of half a degree.
Harrison was convinced that the solution to determining longitude lay in creating a clock that could accurately tell time while at sea.
If I understood the book correctly, this is why creating a working clock was so crucial to figuring out the size of the earth:
In twenty-four hours, the earth spins 360 degrees (this corresponds to the 360 degrees of longitude on a globe). So for every 15 degrees that you move east, the local time moves one hour ahead. For every 15 degrees that you move west, the local time moves back.
Okay, so let’s imagine you are on a boat, and it’s the seventeenth century (which sounds terrifying. We probably all smell terrible and are about thirty seconds away from dying of scurvy or being burned as witches for knowing how to read. Anyway). Sailors can easily tell the local time from the location of the sun. But in order to know their longitude, they needed to know the time at some distant reference point.
Harrison, brilliant and boring old fool that he was, ended up creating five clocks over several decades—one of which (called the H4) eventually won Parliament’s prize. By then Harrison was in his seventies, but he spent the last few years of his life rich, vindicated, and boring.
I suppose, as far as books about clocks go, it’s really on the more interesting end of the spectrum, the bar being spectacularly low. And it was quite popular when it came out, because I guess people didn’t have a lot else going on in the late 1990s.
But to seventeen-year-old me, it was excruciating.
Every day we’d complain about it, and slowly, I became aware of a trend among the girls in my class: a large number of them had fathers who’d read the book and adored it.
“My dad says it’s one of his favorites,” my friend Laura told me incredulously one day. “He liked it so much, he lent it to Erin’s dad, and he said it’s one of the best books he’s ever read.”
Upon hearing this, a rather unexpected and painful pang of longing lodged itself in my throat. I don’t get this feeling anymore when I talk to my dad. But when I was younger, it would pop up whenever I was reminded of something I wanted but knew would never happen. In this case, it was the simple back-and-forth between two people, the stories that arose from seeing someone every day.
Weirdly, this hit me harder than any missed birthday parties, softball games, or holidays. I longed for the ability to incorporate my dad into my everyday life—even the most mundane aspects of it. To be able to gesture to some awful book and roll my eyes and say, “Can you believe my old man liked it?”
And it was that peculiar longing that caused me to mention that droll little book to my father the next time I was on the phone with him.
“I’m reading this book for class,” I said, trying to sound casual, to belie all that I had riding on it, “and it’s so, so boring.”
Just as I tried to explain what it was about, my father stopped me in mid-sentence.
“I just finished that,” he said. “It was fantastic.”
And it was at that point that I may have begun to dance around my room, delighted at the wonderful improbability of it all, which left me, like all my friends, bewildered by my father’s taste in books.
The next day I would go to class and roll my eyes and say to everyone within earshot, “Oh, god, my dad likes it, too,” and it would be wonderful.
I only half-listened as my dad went on about the book’s brilliance, twirling around the room until the telephone cord wrapped itself around me and I had to backtrack to unravel it.
Then my father said something that snapped me to attention.
&nbs
p; “I gave that book to your brother Greg,” he explained. “I told him he had to read it. He thought it was great, too.”
My half-brother Greg was, at least during my childhood and high school years, even more of a mystery than my dad. The product of my dad’s first marriage, he was more than fifteen years older than me. He’d grown up with his mother in the UK. I’d met him only once.
In the coming years, I would get to know my eldest brother better. I’d learn that we both inherited, along with our brother Edward, a tendency to look sort of pissed-off and squinty in photos, even when we’re having a perfectly nice time. Perhaps we aren’t that different from our dad after all. Or perhaps it’s simply due to our shared Eastern European ancestry—Stalin was burdened with the same expression.
I’d learn that, at over six feet tall, his height was passed down from a mutual grandparent of ours—which sounded nearly unbelievable to me (Edward and I are built like hobbits). I’d discover he was a science geek, that he had an affinity for bad sci-fi films and television shows, and that he was into martial arts. I’d meet his wife, Linda, blonde and petite and absolutely crazy about him. She was already married and had grown children when she met Greg, so my brother went from being single to a step-grandfather on the day they got married, something he told me with no small measure of pride.
He still lives in northern England, and every time he finds out that Rand and I are in London, he tries to make it down or at least calls to say hello. Once, we met in the lobby of our hotel, and he bounded across the room with his enormous strides, lifting me off the ground in a massive hug while yelling, “LITTLE SISTER!”
Sometimes, your relationships with people aren’t what you anticipated. Sometimes, they are far, far better.
All Over the Place Page 7