by Dan Begley
“I think I’d want to. But I don’t think I would.”
Rosie blows up. “You gotta be kidding!” Even Dave looks let down, like I’ve violated some sort of man-law. But that’s okay. Let them think what they want, rather than try to explain all that.
I never bring my cell phone to lessons (too dangerous: what if I lapse into Mitch?). It’s ringing when I get to the apartment.
“It’s eleven o’clock. It’s Monday night. Where the hell you been?” Bradley.
“Out. Busy.”
“Doing what?”
“What do you think I was doing?” Not having a couple beers with your sister and friends from the dance studio talking about whether we’d do our guest instructors, that’s for sure. “Dissertation, remember? So, what’s going on?”
What’s going on, it turns out, is that he’s found me a perfect match.
“The couple Skyler and I went out with yesterday brought a friend. And get this: She went to Johns Hopkins. She’s gorgeous. And single. I talked you up, she’d like to meet you. The four of us, this Thursday night.”
Thursday night? That’s dancing. “Sorry, Bradley. Can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” His tone indicates that wasn’t an option.
“What I mean is, I can’t. I’m having dinner with my mom.” Lately, the lies come as easy as breathing. Scary.
“Fine. Then we’ll switch it to Friday. But I’m not taking no for an answer.”
But he’s got it all wrong: why would I say no? Johns Hopkins. Gorgeous. Single. I’m ready to meet the woman of my dreams.
Tuesday morning I actually do head to the library to work on my dissertation. I haven’t cracked a book in a couple weeks, and it’s high time I return to the dusty fourteenth-century road to Canterbury Cathedral with Chaucer and his motley crew. It’s the perfect day to do this—gray, drizzly, cool. But even though I’m only dealing with Middle English and not Old English, it’s no piece of cake and demands concentration, not a mind still bucking to get a latté with Catwalk Mama and stroll the glossy aisles of Bergdorf Goodman. I do manage to make some progress on the “Knight’s Tale” (two sworn blood-brothers vow to kill each other after they fall in love with the same woman: testament to the incredible power of love, or its destructiveness?), then reward myself by browsing through magazines.
The current issue of Travel +Leisure and its cover story about North Carolina catch my eye, so I page through. It’s a great spread, with photos of the Biltmore Estate and the Smokies and Chapel Hill, which are nice, but the best ones are along the coast—the Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island and Pamlico Sound, with their ink blue water and streaky-cloud skies and old weathered lighthouses. It’s all gorgeous, smell-the-salt, feel-the-wet-sand-squishing-between-your-toes, hear-the-waves-crashing sort of gorgeous, and then I think of Marie, who lived in Raleigh, and even though it might take a couple hours to get there, it’s the ocean for chrissakes, and it beats what we have running through town (there’s a reason why the Mississippi is called the “Big Muddy”), and this is what she gave up for Rosie? It floors me again, as it did in the pizza parlor, and all seems a bit absurd. But then another thought leaps from the bushes and throttles me, one that wasn’t there two weeks ago: maybe she did get this right. I mean, Rosie may have a big mouth and be overly horny, but she grows on you, I like her, and it’s pretty clear she thinks the world of Marie and would do anything for her. Which means, if you were inclined to tally it a certain way, Marie traded something she might get to see once a week or month—the ocean—for a best friend she gets to see every day. Some people might even call that… winning.
I go to my father’s house on Wednesday, after class. I’ve chosen a weekday because I don’t want his kids around, and I’d prefer it if Leah weren’t around either. But she is of course, since what kind of wife leaves her husband all by his lonesome less than three weeks after he’s had his chest cracked open in the OR. I think my father’s spoken to her, though, because after she says hello and brings us iced tea and a plate of cookies, she excuses herself with some suspicious-sounding story about needing to go work in the garden, which gives us some time alone.
He’s propped up on the sofa, and we talk about his heart, obviously, and the meds he’s on, and my teaching and Scott, and how Nathan has cut the grass most of the summer, and boy, we could use some rain, and I guess this is how normal people talk, or at least normal fathers and sons, but we’re not that, so I just want to leapfrog all the small talk and ask him why why WHY he left when he did. But an hour in, I can see it’s not going to happen, not today anyway, because even though his color’s better and he’s not wincing as much, he still looks like one of those front-porch Halloween scarecrows—unnatural, stiff, lumpy—and putting him through the ringer with all my questions wouldn’t be too charitable on my part, so it looks like I made the trip out here just to eat a bunch of cookies.
“You want to tell me what’s on your mind?” he asks out of nowhere.
“Mmm? My mind?” I wipe some crumbs from my lips. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, great as it was to see you in the hospital, it was a surprise. As is this, today, just stopping by to shoot the breeze.” His eyes zero in on mine from behind his glasses. “I don’t want to sound cynical, Mitch, but that’s not us.”
What’s the use lying to him now, especially when he’s giving me one of those “Go on, give it to me straight” looks.
“Okay, Dad, I’m not going to beat around the bush,” I declare. Then I go on and beat around the bush, at least a little, in my head, fumbling for a different—and gentler—way of saying it, but I can’t come up with anything. “Mom told me about the affair.”
For a long time he doesn’t speak.
“I wish she hadn’t.”
“She didn’t have a choice. We were talking about how bad the relationship is between you and me, and I said the only thing that would change for me if you died is that I’d have to get a new suit.” I feel squeamish saying it now. “I told her one of the reasons I couldn’t stand you is that you cheated on her. She wanted to set me straight.”
His face remains fixed, expressionless.
I rub my hands on my jeans. “So will you help me understand a few things about that time? How everything… happened?”
He offers a barely perceptible nod.
“Mom told me she was petty and spiteful when she threw the affair in your face. That she wanted to hurt you with the news, give you a reason to go. Why didn’t you?”
The muscles along his jawline flare and tighten, as if I’d poked my finger into a nerve. He shifts awkwardly on the sofa, his thoughts obviously taking him to a place he’d rather not go.
“We were a mess after Emily died, Mitch. The whole family was, but especially your mother and me. We could hardly get out of bed in the morning, look at each other, breathe. But we had to get on with living, and we tried, best as we could. Your mother made it clear what she needed. She needed to talk about what’d happened, replay everything we’d done, or hadn’t done, be sad and angry and bitter and let whatever was there come out. She cried a lot. But I didn’t want to hear it. Not the tears or the second-guessing or the ‘Why Emily?’ So I shut her up. I shut her up and shut her out, turned myself into a stone. Because that was the only way I could deal with knowing we’d let our daughter die.”
“But you didn’t let her die. She had viral meningitis. The doctor said—”
“I don’t care what the doctor said,” he cuts me off sharply. “She was two. She was counting on us. We were her parents. And we let her die.” There’s anger in his eyes, and pain, but it’s almost like you can see right through all of it to the part of his heart that’s still a heap of burnt-out ash. Gradually his look grows softer. “Anyway, what your mother needed was comfort and hope, someone to listen to her, and I wouldn’t give her any of it. She found it with someone else. How could I blame her for that?”
“So you stayed, out of guilt.”
&nb
sp; He nods. “And for Emily, because I couldn’t stand the thought that her death would be what ripped our family apart. Plus, I still had two sons.”
He says it in such an offhanded way, like it’s a no-brainer— what father wouldn’t stay with his two sons under such circum-stances?—but then we both fall silent because we’re thinking the same thing: he still had two sons five years later, and that didn’t keep him from bolting.
I’m starting to feel a little bad for him, now that he’s backed himself into a corner and he’s already so physically uncomfortable.
“Look, Dad. You don’t have to talk about it now. Not if you don’t want to.”
He musters an awful smile. “No, Mitch, I don’t. Because it’s beyond the pale, and you’ll realize what a small and ugly man I was to you. And I always, always thought it’d be better for you to think the worst of your old man, whatever crimes and misdeeds your imagination could conjure up, than know the truth. I’d hoped to take it all to the grave with me, and I nearly managed to pull that one off. But you deserve to know.”
My hands are actually sweating, so I stuff them down into the sides of the chair cushion.
“When your mother and I got married, all I wanted was a happy family. That’s why I let your mom take the lead in raising you children, bring you up Catholic. Because she was the smart one, the cultured one, and I wanted her fingerprints all over your growing-up years. And those early years were good, Mitch. They were wonderful. You have to believe that. But your sister’s death… changed things. Your mother and I didn’t cope well, we showed our worst colors to each other, and she had the affair, and even though we stayed together and tried to do the right thing, we were dead to each other. She didn’t love me anymore. And somewhere along the line, Scott turned against me. He hated me, Mitch, you know that. And just like that, everything I’d loved and cared about was gone. Except you. You were the relationship I could be proud of. My youngest son. And then it was the summer you turned ten, and you and I’d been working on your baseball swing all spring, and I was planning to coach your team…”
He doesn’t need to complete his thought. “And I went away to Oxford.”
My mom’s prep school had given her a professional grant to study for two months at Oxford, and she wanted to take Scott and me with her, enroll us in the young scholars program. Up till then, my parents had done a good job keeping a lid on the tension in the house—a raised voice here or there, an occasional too-quiet dinner—but all hell broke loose over that. There were nasty fights, tooth-and-nail drag downs, and it always came back to this: my dad didn’t want his boys gone for two months; my mom said it was his own damned fault he couldn’t get vacation time to go with us and why ruin a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity just so he could take us to the park a couple times a week for baseball. Of course, they had no idea we heard all that—they thought we were outside or listening to music or sleeping—and ultimately left the decision up to us. My brother had his bags packed in an hour, but I wasn’t so sure. After all, I was the one who’d begged my dad to help me with my swing—which he had—and to coach my team—which he said he would. I felt guilty about that. And I also felt sorry for him, the way my mom had ripped into him in all their arguments. But what about England, and the chance to walk the streets of Sherlock Holmes’s London?
In the end, I rode a plane to England.
Something in my father’s old face crumbles, and his eyes go dark, like it’s happening again right now. “I can’t explain it, Mitch, not in a way that won’t make me sound like a pathetic old man. You were a happy-go-lucky kid going to a brand-new world, because what kid wouldn’t? But it felt like you’d made some fundamental choice. Like you’d crossed over to the other side, to a place where your mom and Scott were, a place where I couldn’t reach you anymore. You were gone. She’d won. I’d lost all of you.”
I try to imagine those two months for my father, passing by Scott’s bedroom, already closed off to him, passing by mine, empty now, too, waking up in a bed that’d been loveless for years—going through every motion of his day—and doing it all alone. I see him out in the family room, paging through our photo album, coming across pictures of Emily when she was alive, those “golden years” of our family; glancing at pictures of himself as a boy, those black-and-white prints of him at his father’s tailor shop, when he was still young and wide-eyed and had all his life ahead of him. And now this was his life, and the only company he had was himself and the echoes of a family no longer there. Funny, but you always think of a kid needing his father. But what about a father needing his kids?
“The three of you were on cloud nine when you came back. Brimming with stories and inside jokes and souvenirs and laughter, and I wanted to take joy in all your excitement. I really did. But God help me, the happier all of you were, the sicker it made me feel. Because that wasn’t my world, Mitch. The walls had gone up and the gate was closed and I was standing outside. And I knew that’s where I’d always be. And I wanted to believe that there was still some bit of happiness out there for me, somewhere. So I left.” His voice catches on that last part, and for a long time the only sign of life in the room is the hum of the overhead fan. Finally, he clears his throat. “I’m not proud of the way I handled it, Mitch. None of it, but especially after the divorce. But I didn’t think you cared. You just shrugged a lot and said you were fine, and I left it at that. And by the time I realized there was so much more than indifference in those shrugs, it was too late: you’d learned to get along without me, and to hate me. And you were better off.”
There’s a photo of me on my First Communion, when I’m eight, and I’m standing with my mom and Scott and all my Catholic relatives, and my hands are stuffed with rosaries and prayer books and everyone’s smiling and laughing, arms draped around each other like some kind of celebratory rugby scrum. My father’s in the picture, too, but barely. He’s off to the side, not part of the group, with some space between him and the rest of us, and he has an uncomfortable look on his face: Should I be in this one or am I intruding? And that’s how he must have felt, all those years, but especially near the end: the outsider, a stranger in his own home, in his own life, and always believing that you could take a pair of scissors and cut him out—cleanly—without affecting anybody else in the picture. He didn’t know how wrong he was.
The back door swings open and there’s commotion in the kitchen. Leah’s come in.
“Hey, Dad,” I whisper, making a wiping motion with my hands to my eyes. “If Leah sees those, she’ll kill me.”
He dabs at his tears, unaware they were there.
Leah glides in a minute later, to a smiling father and son, no hint of anything amiss.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asks me, nodding to my glass.
“Uh, no. No thanks.” I get up. “Actually, I was just heading out.”
I go over to where my father’s sitting on the sofa. We look at each for a long time, just stare into those eyes we’ve kept hidden from each other for what feels like a hundred years. Part of me wants to strangle him for what he did, tell him he’s a stupid fucking old man who can go to hell. The other part of me just wants to cry.
“You comfortable with that pillow?” I ask.
He nods. “I’m fine.”
“Good.” Before I realize what I’m doing, I bend down toward him, but I know it’s not going to be a hug, so I put my hands on his shoulders, and he lifts his hands to mine, and we wind up in something that almost looks like a wrestling hold. But the two of us know that’s not what it is.
“Rest easy, Dad,” I say. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Goodbye, son.”
And then I walk through the front door of my father’s home and into the yard, where the sun feels good on my face.
There are no famous faces at our lesson Thursday night, no Shandi or Tony or winners of Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance? who we can sit around and discuss whether we’d like to star-fuck. Just the usual crowd.
We have our group lesson, then Adonis works with Marie and me, then it’s just Marie and I changing our shoes. That’s when she blindsides me.
“Fran told us what you did for her. I think it was great. We all do.”
We all do? Shit. Fran and her big mouth. “Hmm. Well, that kit was just lying around my place, collecting dust. She did me a favor by taking it off my hands.”
“And the book? That was just lying around?”
I nod happily. “Yes, actually. At least my copy. All I had to do was go to the bookstore and pull another one off the shelf. I didn’t even have to reach.”
She gives me a look.
“I didn’t. I swear.” And I didn’t. “Okay, look. She did something nice for me, I returned the favor. Quid pro quo. Scratch my back, I scratch yours. It’s no big deal.”
“But it is a big deal,” she insists. “She’s done something nice for all of us. I have some potholders and an apron because she knows I like to cook. Rosie has a poncho, with scissors and roses on it. And all she got from us was thank-you cards. You actually gave her a gift, something she could enjoy.” Her look, combined with her tone, makes me very uncomfortable. “Do you know how thoughtful that is?”
And the answer to that is No. I don’t. Honestly. Because buying books for grandmas who knit me things, and dancing, and putting gas in a car, and writing a book called Catwalk Mama that I don’t hate, and eating popcorn with Sno-Caps and Milk Duds and Whoppers, and having a friend named Rosie, it’s all new to me. I’m in uncharted territory. My GPS device is scratching its head, trying to figure out exactly where the hell I am. And the problem is, I need to get my bearings, quick, because if I don’t, if I keep going around giving away possessions and books that could be traced to Mitch, and doing other things for reasons I don’t quite understand, I’m going to find myself in a place I know I don’t want to be: Disasterville.