by Jan Cherubin
I didn’t want to say yes and I didn’t want to say no, so I got up, left the cup with the melting snowball on the chaise, and walked past the folding table where a kid sat and punched membership cards. My father followed, but the metal gate clanked shut against him. Outside of the chain-link fence, I broke into a run. I was wearing the purple bikini Johnny had given me for my birthday. Inside the gate with everyone else wearing skimpy bathing suits I was fine, but now outside the gate, I felt undressed. The swimming club was on the border between county and city, and as I ran through the neighborhood, split-levels gave way to narrow row houses from another era, left standing like Roman ruins. I saw a man in a suit getting into a car. My chest was bouncing and so I did not run as fast as my legs could take me. I was ashamed of my body, and I was also ashamed of not running faster and I didn’t know what to do, where to hide, whether to go fast or slow. A woman in a party dress corralled her children inside, holding her hand over her little boy’s eyes. I wasn’t naked, but I felt naked. The woman acted like I was naked. I ducked behind a hydrangea bush on her next-door neighbor’s lawn just as the Torino came cruising down the block. He saw me and stopped the car. I stepped out covering the tops of my breasts with one arm, and the tops of my thighs with the other arm, trying to hide the pubic hair curling out of my bikini bottoms. He leaned across the seat to open the passenger door and handed me a striped beach towel. I wrapped myself in it and sat beside him. He made a U-turn and we drove down Milford Mill Road and over the railroad tracks. I felt better wrapped in the towel. I had been thinking, if having a father was so important to him that the fact that he didn’t have a father defined his whole life, then why wasn’t his being a father to me just as important? But I couldn’t organize my thoughts to form a spoken question. Other people my age had it all figured out. They seemed to know who to hate and why, how to rebel, but I remained stuck in my father’s story. He drove past the clearing in the woods I liked where the county kept yellow school buses crammed together in a little dell and he cleared his throat and blinked several times behind his glasses.
“I’m sorry,” he said. That was all he could think of.
“It’s hard having a father,” I said.
Possibly, I forgave him too soon. One evening, he insisted I come home from Liz’s house because he was making a special dinner. When I got back I saw that we were having spaghetti. I mocked him for calling it special. No one liked being mocked, but for him, it was intolerable. He turned into Bluto from a Popeye cartoon. Steam came out of his ears. He chased me down the hall and caught up to me and whacked my back with the flat of his hand making a hollow sound— clop, clop, clop. “I work hard to put food on the table, you snotty kid.” Clop, whack. I landed in my room, slammed the door and locked it. A few minutes later there was a knock. He was sorry again. Would I forgive him?
He decided to make it up to me by inviting Johnny over for dinner the following night. He and my mother were going out, Susan had a date, and I was going to be home alone. Johnny would keep me company, and we would eat the leftover spaghetti. I liked spaghetti reheated in a frying pan with bits of sauce clinging to the strands and the bottom burned until it was crispy. When we finished dinner, it was still light out. Johnny told me to lie on the sofa. The drapes were open. Kids were playing in the street. I knew them. I could have been outside kicking a ball around with those kids. I lay down and he kneeled on the floor beside the sofa and kissed random places—my ears, my neck, my hair. He took off my glasses and laid them on the coffee table and he kissed my cheekbones and forehead and my mouth. Children called to each other between spurts of breathless laughter. I worried about the drapes being open, and then I stopped thinking about it. I was wearing red flowered shorts I had sewn in Home Ec. The shorts had an elastic waistband—we hadn’t learned zippers yet—and Johnny looped a finger inside the elastic and took the shorts down over my tanned legs. He did the same with my pink and white striped bikini underpants, and then he moved my tanned knees apart and kissed the top of each thigh. He came in closer and kissed me where I peed. It felt good, very good, but not as good as it would feel every time from then on, because the night of the spaghetti dinner I was astonished it was happening at all.
CHAPTER 38
After the Geest appointment at Hopkins, we returned my father to Brenda and went out to eat. Susan and I told my mother about how he’d woken us up in the middle of the night and asked us to promise that we’d give up our inheritance and turn the money over to her. We told her we promised, and we expected her to be pleased. But my mother was not pleased. She was upset. “He should be able to leave money to his children AND leave me the money I deserve.”
“What money do you deserve?” Susan said.
“How many times do I have to tell you? The money from the credit union!”
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe Susan and I didn’t see that Brenda was strong-arming my father to exclude my mother from his will. But my father’s will wasn’t real to us at the time, because his death was an impossibility.
In the same way, I thought, my mother did not believe in their divorce. Having been with my father since childhood, the idea of either one of them going ahead in life without the other was impossible. They were separated for seven years before my mother filed for divorce, and she did so then only because her friends pressured her and she relented, not thinking it would really change anything in the end. My parents did not get along, but there was never any question they belonged together.
I never felt more certain of this than the day my parents drove up to New York and had pastrami sandwiches at my brownstone apartment. Although my father told us that day about Brenda’s ultimatum, and said outright he was considering marrying her, I figured it was more of a threat than anything else. He wanted to see if he could still hurt my mother. He wanted to see if she still loved him. When we finished off the pastrami and the last of the pastry and my fabulous coffee, my father asked Fred to tune the radio to WNEW. He wanted to practice dancing before the wedding they were going to in Connecticut, and he wanted something by Sinatra. “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was playing. My father took my mother by the hand and they waltzed around the living room staring wistfully into each other’s eyes.
That was April. In June, I got a frantic phone call from my mother. I’d never heard her so upset. My mother was the calmest person I knew. She liked to bicker about trivial things, but about big things she was usually unruffled to a fault, but now her voice was trembling. She’d spoken to my father. He decided to go for it. He and Brenda were getting married. My mother begged me to come down to Baltimore. “I can’t talk to my friends,” she said. I took the train from Penn Station. She paced her apartment. She was smoking again for real, not just bumming random cigarettes. She talked in a nonstop stream rehashing arguments, second-guessing herself. I’d seen friends in this state—unhinged by a man’s rejection. I’d been in a similar state myself. But this was not the mother I knew.
“Don’t you understand, Joanna? Don’t you see? This is big. Marrying Brenda changes everything. She’ll have rights.”
“You were the one who wanted the divorce, remember?” I said, unhelpfully.
“I wanted the separation. I did not want the divorce.”
“But you were the one who asked for it.”
“Right, right! You’re right! I’m the idiot who finally filed for divorce, it was me, I was the one! But I didn’t really want it. You know your father’s impossible to live with. And Jesus Christ, I gave him slack, but he went too far. With Nola he went too far. He was indiscreet. Everyone and his uncle knew what he was up to. It was cruel. Look at how he treated you. With Nola, he crossed a line. So yes, I wanted the separation. But not the divorce. I only asked for a divorce because of my stupid friends. Because I was stupid and listened to my friends! I resisted their advice for a long time. Seven years we were separated, and I was doing just fine. Never listen to your friends, Joanna. Seriously. Don’t ever take advice from friends. You
have to move on, they kept saying. “You have to get on with your life. It’s been seven years.” But I was happy separated. I had my own apartment, I was going out with guys, your father was seeing Darleen, but we were still connected. Clyde is my family. I don’t want that to change. He’ll always be my family. But my friends thought our relationship was sick. I was stuck in a rut, they said. I wasn’t married, but I wasn’t divorced. It bothered them. Why did it bother them so much? I was happy, so what was the problem? But then I started to think there had to be something wrong with me. My life wasn’t progressing, whatever that means. I should have realized, what it means, to them anyway, is that marriage is everything. They thought my attitude would change once I was divorced. I’d be more open to other men. I wasn’t giving these other guys a chance since Daddy and I still saw each other, we went to the movies, had dinner, saw our kids together, and somehow this wasn’t normal, since I was sleeping with these other guys. Maybe my friends were jealous, I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like that I had it both ways. Men get to have it both ways if they want. Men get away with it all the time, they have their cake and eat it too. But God forbid a woman has some fun. So I listened to my friends and I filed for divorce and now look what happened. I mean, look who’s getting married now?”
“I hate your friends.”
“No. Don’t hate them.” She stopped pacing and sat at the table with me and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “They thought they were doing the right thing. Maybe it was the right thing.” She folded her arms on the table and lay her head down on them.
“So if Daddy doesn’t get married, are you saying you’ll go back to him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She brought her head up. “Maybe. I could definitely see living next door to him.”
“I always liked that idea,” I said. “But seriously, can you imagine being a couple again?”
“I think I can. Now that I’m seeing my reaction to Brenda, it’s stirring up a lot of feelings.” My mother was quiet. Her eyes darted back and forth. “Yes,” she said. “I want to get back together. I do. I don’t want to lose Clyde. He’s the love of my life. Do you realize how long we’ve been together? I was sixteen when he walked into my mother’s house and rented a room.”
I hesitated leaving her so upset, but she asked that I act as a go-between and I agreed. So I packed an overnight bag and left her apartment to spend the night at my father’s. He met me at the kitchen door with his arms open, in his usual way. We hugged and then sat in the living room and he gave me some of the jelly beans he liked to eat at night, and we chatted about my latest underachieving job as a proofreader and Fred’s latest published story and whether we had gotten around to painting the ceiling in our apartment to lighten up the place, which of course, we hadn’t. My father asked questions, but he controlled the flow of conversation. Otherwise, he wasn’t easy to talk to. He could be dismissive, that hadn’t changed much. Less than an hour had passed when he told me to go to bed, he wanted to read.
In the morning after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, we went out back to his garden to harvest string beans. I admired his rows of tomato plants tied like marionettes to a wooden contraption he built. Then I got down to business on my knees in the grass, plucking beans while he sat in a lawn chair gripping his weeder pole like a staff. It was the middle of July, hot and humid. The cicadas droned and surged and the sun beat down on us. He was shirtless, with beads of sweat glistening in his graying chest hairs.
“Why are you sweating?” I said. “I’m the one doing the labor.” I snapped off a bean to prove my point, and tossed it into the basket beside me.
“You think giving orders is easy?” he said. “Here, borrow my hat.” The girlish ribbon fluttered.
“No thanks.”
“This isn’t some crap you buy at a souvenir stand, you know. I order them from the place where the real gondoliers get theirs.” He took a sip from the coffee cup he had balanced on the fence post. “You wanna take a break, you poor girl?”
“Let me finish this row.” I thrust my hands under the scratchy plant leaves feeling around for the beans that dangled like earrings.
“Hard work is good for you. Nothing better. So what do you think of Brenda?”
“She’s OK, I guess.”
“She’s just like your mother.”
I sat back on my heels. “Brenda? You’re kidding. She’s nothing like Mom.
“Yeah, she is. I always go for the same type of woman. Brenda’s a downer. Evie’s a downer. They’re down and I’m up.”
“Wait. That’s not fair. I mean, I agree Mom can be passive—or passive-aggressive is more like it—but she’s not a downer.” I stopped what I was doing and pushed my damp bangs out of my eyes. “C’mon. Mom’s always up for fun. She loves to tell jokes. She’s lively. She laughs all the time. Brenda’s so reserved. I have no idea what Brenda thinks.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“How can you say Mom’s a downer? She doesn’t get depressed, she has tons of friends. You told me Brenda doesn’t have any friends.”
“Why are you bad-mouthing Brenda?” My father pulled up the weeder pole and speared it back into the ground again.
“You asked what I thought.”
“Look, you think I don’t know Brenda’s a downer? She’s down and I’m up, just like it was with your mother.”
“Stop saying that!” I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees. “There is no comparison!”
“Brenda’s a strange lady, I’ll give you that,” my father said thoughtfully. He reached for the cup of cold coffee on the fence post and sipped it. “Ah,” he said, with satisfaction. He put the cup back on the post. “She’s strange, all right. I’m going to marry her, though. You wanna know why? I’ll tell you why. Her persistence is greater than my resistance. How do you like that?”
“Everything isn’t a joke.”
“Look, kiddo, I’m here by myself. You have Fred. What about me? You want me to be alone?”
I didn’t want my father to be lonely, but what he said made me think of myself, how fear of being alone kept me with Fred. Fear cemented the relationship. Fear that I would have no clout in the world without a man. The opposite was true, too, though. I would never be anybody if Fred was my proxy.
“So? So?” my father said. “You want me to be alone?”
“You could get back together with Mom,” I said.
“No,” he said. A shadow passed over his face. “No. Can’t get back with your mother. It’s too late. Too much baggage.”
There was the dismissive tone I dreaded. The conversation shut down. What did he mean by baggage? That things were said that couldn’t be taken back? That my mother had seen him at his most vile, and he couldn’t live with that? Once when I was little, he slapped her across the face and made her lip bleed. For days there was a dark red scab. He threw a plastic cereal bowl in a rage. She ducked and it hit the wall. He was violent, but she provoked him.
I remembered we were having pancakes. I must have been eight or nine. My father asked if my grandmother had been invited for Sunday dinner. My mother said no, she didn’t want her mother to come. He said, “Evie, you have no compassion, you have no heart.” My mother was hurt and angry. “Goddamnit, don’t tell me how to act with my own family,” she said.
“I don’t understand you,” he said. “If my mother were alive, she would live with us!”
“Your mother? Live with us?” She laughed sarcastically. “Over my dead body.”
I was stunned by her cruelty. Her mother-in-law was long gone. It would have cost my mother nothing to agree with him.
“You know, Clyde,” she said, “if your mother were still alive, you probably wouldn’t think she was so great.” She pulled out the last cigarette and crumpled up the pack.
“My mother was a saint,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” my mother said. “A saint.” She struck a match, drew in on the cigarette and exhaled. Her voice was tired no
w. “Right,” she said. “The saint who dropped you off at the orphanage.”
I put the basket of string beans on the picnic table and sat down on the bench facing his lawn chair with my back against the table. I stared at him, forcing him to look me in the eye. “All right. Fine,” I said. “So you have a girlfriend, a significant other. You don’t have to marry her.”
“Joanna, listen to me.” My father’s eyes were provocative slits behind his glasses. “Brenda loves me like you wouldn’t believe. This is no bullshit. She said she would kill herself if I didn’t marry her. Did you ever receive such a declaration of love?”
“No, thank God. C’mon! Threatening suicide? That’s manipulative. Mom’s right. That’s emotional blackmail.” I let that sink in and flicked off an ant that was crawling into my sneaker.
“She agreed to separate bedrooms. She doesn’t like it, but she agreed.”
“I don’t want you to be lonely,” I said. “You know I want you to be happy.”
“Who said anything about happy?” His crusty voice was edged with derision. Then he softened. “In my day, we didn’t know from happy. Either you had enough to eat, or you didn’t.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” I said. I laughed. I hoped he knew I wasn’t mocking him, just telling the truth. “You’ve spent your whole life talking about how to be happy.”