The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  My parents finally divorced when I was sixteen, but it is easily arguable that they should’ve parted ways far earlier. The horror stories are nothing short of gross, and almost too embarrassing to type: he twice was arrested for indecent exposure, having flashed his genitals to young girls once at the mall, again at a bus stop; he forayed into the world of cocaine with confidence and eagerness; he drank himself into staggering, forgetful, mean oblivions, many ending with him passed out at the wheel in our driveway, waking only when the sun glared too strong. But most importantly, the air in my childhood home was always thick with fear, control, and irrationality. After sixteen years of living with my father, I could barely breathe.

  I would love to be the exception in the abuse equation, the girl who tells psychoanalysts where to stick their theories, but I can’t. I hated my father, very likely still do in some ways, but I always wanted his love, craved it with the intensity that a stranded wanderer in the desert desires water. So when the bad times subsided, as they always did for periods of remission, and the onslaught of heartfelt-sounding apologies and promises came, I accepted them. The words are clichéd and trite, straight out of Lifetime movies. Barrages of “I’m so sorry” and “You know I’d never hurt you again” are difficult to swallow when they come from the person doing the damage, but though I’m a cynic in most ways, I always subscribed to the hope that people can change—especially my father, who sounded so convincing delivering those lines. And maybe this is why I drink. Constantly repeating a cycle that inevitably fails is enough to drive anyone to seek a happier place to live. My happier place has long since been the bar. Alcohol does not disappoint; it is the perfectly consistent, dependable anesthetic that gets me slightly less in touch with this history but in some ways infinitely more linked to it. The irony is that when I drink, I rarely contemplate the similarities.

  The last words I spoke to my father were “Fuck you.” At the turn of the millennium. He called the house my brother, Mike, and I shared, and when I answered, he didn’t recognize my voice. I tried to convince him that it was me speaking, his only daughter. Thinking it a joke, he argued and insisted I put his daughter on the line. I hung up and he called back. I tried to persuade him again—all three times he called. Finally I decided that if my own father didn’t know the sound of my voice, didn’t hear in my pleading my desperate need for him to sense that I was his daughter, then fuck him. Tough last words, but I still don’t regret them. They’d slowly gathered momentum over my lifetime, formulating stroke by stroke until I had first one letter, then two, then finally two whole, enormous words that summed up what I desperately needed to say.

  Mike had called to tell me that he thought our father had been murdered, but it wasn’t until hours later, as we watched the eleven o’clock news together at a local Irish pub, that we learned he’d been the gunman who had killed others before taking his own life. Fortunately, it was a Tuesday night, so the bar was slow and we were the only people in the back room with the pool tables and TV. The bartender, who’d known me for years as a regular, helped me double-fist Guinness and Jameson, though none of it seemed to register on my system. We shot a few racks of the game my father had taught me to play when I was far too young to be in bars. I said little and played well—perhaps better than I ever had before. Bent at the waist, positioned at the head of the pool table, the green spreading before me, multiplying, widening, I made my shots, one after the other, my stroke never steadier, the balls sinking with ease. My father taught me those tricks—how to bank, to ride the rail—and I wondered what it meant that I was poised under pressure, that I played his game so well, that my hands were perfectly even. I drank another Jameson, tried to abandon my thoughts.

  We played until the news came on. On tiptoe, I reached to turn up the volume and sat back down on the green felt next to my brother, each of us with stick in hand. The Channel 3 chopper-cam zoomed in shakily on my father’s house. I couldn’t believe how long his grass was; he used to take landscaping seriously. Uniforms—both police and SWAT—swarmed the property, while the perimeter of the yard was spotted with the neighbors who had gathered to watch someone else’s tragedy, to have a story to tell over dinner. Mike and I watched in silence as three bagged bodies, one after the other, were wheeled out the front door of my father’s small suburban home like some grotesque ballet.

  Earlier in the day, the police wouldn’t tell us much, so we hadn’t called our mother to let her know what was going on; we had decided instead to wait for the facts, to not ruin her workday with ambiguous worrying. In that six-hour span of time from when Mike and I first found out until we saw our father’s name printed in fat, bold letters on TV, we hadn’t been sure whether he was dead or alive. Too many possible scenarios. A number of them left him alive. We sequestered ourselves in my home first, certain that my father did not know where I lived, and then grew stir-crazy and sure that he wouldn’t think to look for us at the Irish pub. My brother had different worries than I did, although he sympathized with mine. My father had embraced him as the firstborn son, the one who would carry on the family name. I was the mistake who, in his Old World estimation, should’ve been born male, so the abuse tended to land at my feet, not Mike’s. If my father were on a killing spree, were, indeed, still at large, I’d surely be at the top of his to-do list. I’m certain my brother felt fear too, but it was likely that of instability. If my father had really snapped, had finally lost it and crossed the proverbial line that he’d always seemed to dance close to but never over, surely anyone, my brother included, could be harmed. Or maybe Mike was just afraid that he’d miss me and hit him by accident.

  Two minutes after the story went out on the news, my cell phone rang. I took it out of my pocket, saw that it was my mother, walked out onto the deck, lit a cigarette, and answered with the line “We already know.” My mother did not cry then—too much shock and worry to process anything other than maternal instinct. I assured her we were fine; we were at the bar. She wanted us to come over that night, and though Mike did, I couldn’t. Instead I stayed until last call, poking at the ice at the bottom of my whiskey until I went home, drank another beer, and curled up on my cold living room floor. I don’t remember sleeping or dreaming, but when I awoke, half a Yuengling Lager was still firmly gripped in my right hand, fibers of the carpet pushed deep into my cheek and nostril.

  My grandfather’s note was eloquent. He didn’t want to be a burden any longer and was curious about what happens after death, not at all terrified in the face of that unknown. He begged for those who survived him not to mourn him—he’d been lost years ago. My father, like most suicides, left no note, no closure, no justification. Just a long list of unanswerable questions and confusion.

  Ten years earlier, my brother had told me that our father had suffered a mild heart attack. Mike announced this somberly as I shoveled my way through a bowl of Special K. Without lifting my eyes, I asked if he was dead. When my brother said no, I replied, callously, “Bummer.” So when the news came and I found what my father had done, my response terrified me. I’d always thought his death would be freeing in some way, a release from the years I’d lived in fear of him and his volatility. I’d believed that I’d managed to forge some sort of peace with my past or had finally drenched myself in enough alcohol to mask the details of my childhood. Maybe it was because, even though he lived two towns over, I’d closed that chapter with those final harsh words. But when I got the news, my entire body convulsed, a pulsing that I’d imagined only people with epilepsy or characters in novels with the DTs got. I felt uncontrolled and spastic, a full-body experience with grief.

  I read the police and autopsy reports repeatedly in an effort to understand the literal details of that last evening, but none of that really matters. What does is that all of the history that I’d managed to come to terms with, the years of abuse that I’d crafted into stories and fables, came boiling back to the surface. Had it just been a suicide, like the one my grandfather embraced with his shotgun, I th
ink my reaction would’ve been different. But this scenario was too reminiscent. My father once held me at gunpoint when I came home from school. A slurred rant about teaching my mother a lesson, a shotgun steadied against the kitchen table to fix its aim. Luckily, his anger morphed into a sobbing grief, and he stumbled down the hallway, gun in hand, and passed out in his bedroom. But over the years, as I abandoned my youthful angst and anger and attempted to embrace a life that actually lets strangers in with a shred of hope, I always, deep down, believed that my father knew how to toe the line between abusive and sociopathic. Yes, he had threatened the lot of us, but he had never crossed over. This time he had.

  I’d only met the girl he killed once, on Christmas, just before I told my father off that final time. Like my grandfather, my father shacked up with a replacement family dynamic that mirrored the one he’d lost. The woman was a brunette like my mother—though the similarities between the two stopped there—and the children, an older daughter and younger son, were about as far apart in age as my brother and me. The only reason the son survived the rampage was that he happened to be in juvenile detention at the time.

  The girlfriend was troubled, and while I hate to write anything unflattering about the dead, she was an addict. My father told us that he’d had to lock up even cough medicine in his safe because she would drink a full bottle of it in search of a cheap buzz. When I first met her, she was braless in pajamas at four in the afternoon, hair unbrushed, slurring her way through holiday tidings. The son seemed to like my brother, whom he’d met before, but wouldn’t say a word to me. Then there was the daughter. She was sweet and introverted and liked to draw—like me in so many ways that watching her draw was like looking into a mirror to my past. Overall she was glum, but she perked up when she told me about her art classes, and when I got a look at her pitiful broken pencils and used paper, I drove back to my house and bagged up charcoals, oils, acrylics, pens, pads—everything I could to make the guilt subside. Jesus, did I feel guilty. I could see in her eyes that same desperation to be saved that I’d felt my whole life, like it was a language only we spoke, and much as I wanted to help her—to grab her hand and tell her we were making a break for it, that I’d never let her suffer through those parents again—I obviously couldn’t kidnap her. As I pulled away from my father’s house that night, that sinking, guilty feeling gnawed at me so ferociously that the only way I knew how to silence it was with a twelve-pack.

  I never went back to my father’s house until after the deaths, until it was a crime scene, and I suppose the physical distance helped me repress the memory of the girl that I’d identified with so much that we could’ve been the same person—we were, in some ways, the same little girl. So later, much later, when I received the phone call and knew people had been killed, part of me hoped it was she who wielded the gun and killed my father like I’d wanted to so many times, but I sensed immediately and innately, directly from my gut, that she was dead.

  I went to work tending bar the day after the news. No makeup on, barely functioning, eyes puffed, but I needed the distraction. After a night of describing my father into the phone to coroners and policemen, answering questions like “Did he have any tattoos, birthmarks?” I learned that it was far easier for investigators to throw around words like estranged than it is to hear them. I slept in tiny fits that week, passing out for twenty minutes or so at a time, deconstructing the scene, the words, my father, all of it. Estranged. Strange. Well, he had a gold tooth. No, I don’t remember which side. I tried to picture him smiling. Was it the left? I couldn’t be sure. Birthmarks? I considered telling them to shave his head, that surely there’d be a small cluster of sixes under that mass of curly black hair. Estranged. Stranger.

  As the oldest surviving child, I became the executrix of his affairs, and spent a week, on and off, in my father’s house, Vicks VapoRub dabbed on the divot beneath my nose to mask the smell of decomposition that permeated the carpet, walls, and air. It had taken three days for the bodies to be discovered. My brother helped at first as we went through years of back paperwork in an effort to find something, anything, that would help us legally. A will, an insurance policy, the deed to the house, the titles to the four broken-down cars in the yard. The legal affairs fell into my lap, and it became my duty to sell off his possessions in order to maximize the estate. In retrospect, someone else may have been better suited for the task. I sold his boat at a bar for $500, though it was surely worth more. TVs and audio equipment I gave to friends, and I actually kept a CD player for myself. When I found that it enjoyed making songs skip only during my favorite parts, I took it into the street and smashed it as my neighbors looked on. I also adopted his fish, the only witnesses to the crime, but of course they have no memory. I gave them gangster names and begrudgingly cared for them until, thankfully, one year later, some kind of ichthyosis infected the lot of them and they went belly-up.

  Although I did find two insurance policies and the title for a Chevy Blazer in my father’s basement, the other discoveries were far worse: dirty letters and sex toys, private fantasies that no one should commit to paper just in case their children one day have to sift through them. Barrels to guns and eleven boxes of ammunition that the police didn’t take sat in the open safe, I assume because the mishmash of parts weren’t usable without the triggers and grips—though I thought it terribly irresponsible of them to leave that stuff behind. Tax returns from fifteen years earlier. Smutty, bushy, Greek porn. Almost 1,000 empty trash bags on the metal shelves. Burned-out lightbulbs. Receipts of donations to the church. Evidence of bad spelling everywhere. There was a paper I’d written for Greek school on what Easter meant to me that I could no longer translate in its entirety, though I remembered having gotten in trouble for it when I’d gushed about candy and a bunny instead of penitence and Jesus. But the numbness I’d carried with me over the course of that week turned to tears for the first time when I discovered a stained manila folder with my name on it. My father had over fifty pictures of me as a child that I’d never seen—happy, smiling photos that served as evidence of a childhood I simply didn’t and don’t remember. And while he’d always made sure that I knew that he loved my brother more than me, he had only fourteen pictures of Mike.

  Before leaving my father’s house for the last time—the last time either of us would set foot indoors, anyhow—my brother and I stood in the living room, scanning the panorama of violence. Just above the couch hung the framed painting of Crete that had been in my parents’ bedroom for so many years, and our gazes seemed to stop on it at the same time.

  “We should smash that piece of shit,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Mike agreed. “Absolutely.”

  He hoisted it off the wall and held it between us so that the painting faced us, the end of it resting against the floor.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  We each lifted a leg and stomped down. To our surprise, our feet returned with a bouncing jerk.

  The painting, that embodiment of everything my father stood for, was nothing but a framed beach towel.

  “What the fuck?” Mike asked, laughing. “Who frames a towel?”

  I laughed too. In the moment it seemed absurdly funny, like a great practical joke from beyond the grave, so we fell into that contagious, ridiculous laughter, cackling until our stomachs cramped and tears crept down our cheeks, but simultaneously we quieted. Our business wasn’t finished.

  Turn after turn we furiously stomped the cloth, our legs springing back to us repeatedly in failure, so we retaliated with a flurry of stomping, with anger and determination to drive a hole straight through that impossible, goddamned towel. Exhausted, we paused and stared at one another. Finally Mike said, “I got it,” and opened the Swiss Army knife on his key ring. He looked at me as though for approval, so I nodded quickly, and he jabbed his stubby knife clean through the towel.

  “Oh, you’ve gotta try this,” he said.

  And so we stood in that house, the scent of decomposing bodies s
till thick in the air, taking turns stabbing the beach towel my father had often pointed to when recalling tales of his home. I pierced the Minotaur’s forehead, slicing from the tip of one horn down to the center of its dark and broad torso, while Mike took to the lettering, slashing through the words Crete and Greece, splitting the Hellenic alphabet in two. Had anyone looked in the front door, I’m sure they’d have thought that our mania, our temporary fixedness on destruction and violence, was some depraved family tradition, but we passed the knife back and forth, not speaking a word, carving the faded blue fabric of the Aegean Sea into foamy white shreds until finally there was no decipherable picture left.