had to remind myself that the hopeless man strapped to the
nursing home floor was my father. His eyes were black and vacant
like a deserted alley, the fire that once lived there was dead
and buried before the man. I ignored the gummy stains on the
linoleum hospital tile and got down next to him. I could smell
the urine that leaked into his pants and seeped through the air.
I wanted this to be easy somehow, to be able to reach out and
touch him, but I hesitated. “Dad?” The word came
out like a creaking door and felt bitter and uncomfortable on
my tongue.
My mind raced to any subject other than the one that brought
me here. It ran to thoughts of my sister and for once, I wished
she would breeze in to absorb all the energy in the room. I thought
of my mother sitting out in the waiting room, eyes past blood
red. I thought of my brother dead in his Lazy Boy at 44. I wondered
if I had packed enough underwear or if I would get a ticket for
parking in the red zone outside. Then I thought about my father’s
white crippled dog and wondered where she was now. I thought
of a family picture a friend had taken of us and remembered joking
with her that it looked like a reality TV version of the Addams
Family.
“I don’t know who you are, but you are beautiful,” this
man strapped to the floor mattress said to me. Tears burned into
my eyes like hot acid.
When my mother called me at my office, my first thought was
that it was inconvenient. “If you want to see your father,
it is time.” Two days before Christmas, I watched myself
from outside my body, talking to the airlines, buying my ticket,
telling my boss, packing my suitcase. I rode a roller coaster
while guilt, anger, sadness and regret fought for space in the
front car. I remembered as a child wondering why my life wasn’t
like the Brady Bunch episodes I sat glued to. Bad things over
and gone in a half an hour. Dads that gave ice cream sodas and
hugs. Uncomplicated and smooth. Brothers and sisters together
fighting over TV channels and who gets the extra bedroom. I couldn’t
peel myself away.
I hadn't seen my father in years. It was always easy to postpone
with kids, with work. But now I was out of time. I still tried
to talk myself out of it until the very last second with excuses,
fear possessing me like some evil spirit. I had to force myself
to get on the plane, knowing this was my last chance to spackle
over any of that black hole inside of me.
My sister wouldn't be here. She told me she’d rather regret
it than chance letting one of his poisoned barbs slide inside
her to root. I could hear her chain-smoking through her words
on the other end of the line. My mother was here, taking care
of him in the hospital. This woman he’d done his best to
destroy stood by him until the very end.
I held his cold hand in mine; large blue veins tunneled under
his tissue paper skin. I came here to tell him one thing- to
tell him that I forgive him. I tried on the words like a piece
of clothing I wasn’t sure would fit. I had rehearsed this
over and over. Three simple words and I wasn’t sure I could
do it. All the counselors and AA sponsors sat like a committee
in my mind telling me to let go with love- to pray for him. They
promised an antidote for my pain beginning with three simple
words. The bruises and wounds could heal, they promised. The
words ping-ponged in my head but wouldn’t come out. I imagined
the fire rushing back into his eyes. “Forgive me? Forgive
me for what you stupid…” the words he had brandished
as weapons. Sticks and stones, Dad, they could break me. What
would I tell him? Be sorry, Dad. Be sorry for walking out on
me. For telling me there was no room for me when he was playing
and laughing with my sister, letting his favorite child crawl
over his chest like a jungle gym. For leaving me with a gap in
my heart that could never be filled? For leaving me mistaking
iron fists for love? For the countless other reasons I shouldn’t
be here and why my brother and sister weren’t.
The man in front of me looked harmless. A cute old cane holder
shuffling through the park. His once proud beard was now uneven
and grey, growing where it liked. I watched my mother love him.
I watched my sister love him. I watched his son love him. Loving
him was like getting close to a razor. You didn’t realize
you had been cut until you walked away and looked back to see
the trail of blood behind you. You didn’t even feel the
nick. But as time goes on, it starts to sting and smart while
your skin slides open to bleed.
“My mother,” he used to say, “beat me daily and
I loved her for it. I was blind and she didn’t want me
to get hurt out in the world.” His mother had scrubbed floors
for two decades and died in an insane asylum. My father started
his habit of walking as a young child and walked every day of
his life, as if he could leave something behind him. He had wandered
a deserted railroad track for the last 5 years of his life, stopping
every morning for a breakfast burrito at Del Taco. It was the
manager of Del Taco that called when he first started to slip
away—he had found him digging through the trash, disoriented.
My mother’s phone number was crumpled in his jacket pocket.
My father kept a notebook in a back pocket that he would jot
down his ideas in as he walked. “I had the most productive
thoughts” he would say. In his other pocket, he kept
a red bandanna that he would occasionally wipe across his nose.
He wasn’t made for getting kids off to school and thinking
of bedtimes and bills to pay and who to call to fix the leaky
toilet. My mother knew when she met him and married him that
he wasn’t made for these things. He had already left
one marriage and a son in his wake. But she believed that if
she loved him enough, or wished it hard enough, that maybe
he would be able to live in the same world she did. She had
two daughters with him, hoping they would be the magic dust
that would transform him into her prince.
“I let my girls raise themselves,” he was proud
of saying.
My mother was an unlikely Cinderella, having to believe everyone
was happy and loved, warm and fed. In better times I called it
hopeful. After all this man had done to her, she could stand
by him. She only saw the good in him. My mind was a judge, scanning
the evidence for conviction or acquittal. I had learned long
ago that we live life in shades of gray, never black or white.
My mother wasn’t equipped to deal with my father’s
underground tunnels. She was a surface dweller, used to Midwestern
green eggs and ham. I am what I am. She had been raised to deal
with Midwestern families and Midwestern problems. Children that
didn’t thump their heads on the floor, or come home asking
what bad words meant after seeing them scrawled on the schoolyard
spaceship. Marriages that lasted and went to church on Sundays.
Secrets that stayed secrets. Skeletons that stayed in closets.
I watched my mother love this man. I’m not sure how she
picked this man. Or, if he picked her, a vulnerable rose on a
vine.
“Your mother is a brainless princess who blew her
career by hanging out with faggots. She always trusted the
wrong people.” The
ghost of his voice pierced my memories.
I heard the glass crash and the shouting voices while I was
playing Twister with my downstairs neighbor. Her mother had stopped
playing the piano when she heard the noise. I asked her if I
could use the phone, please, to call the police. I couldn't see
that my father was holding a broken champagne bottle to my mother's
throat, but I knew enough to be afraid. I found my little sister
hiding in her closet. Shortly after that, she started banging
her head against the wall, sometimes for hours. I’d go
into her room and watch her. I’d cover my head or turn
the TV on to tune out the thuds. Marcia and Greg and Jan.
I watched my mother and father’s relationship from afar,
like a scary movie; I put my hands over my eyes, hoping that
I wouldn’t get bad dreams from the haunting visions.
I watched my half brother try to get love from our father, like
a farmer cultivating clay soil. He looked at my sister and I
as competition and outran us, working harder and harder, running
on a treadmill that would blow his heart up when he was 44 and
had finally given up.
I watched my sister love this man. She picked him at a young
age to latch onto, rejecting any close ties with anyone else.
Dad was hers. They wove a tapestry together, an alternate universe
of inside meaning and exclusion that grew into cysts and poisons
inside her.
After the police left, my father was gone. He disappeared and
we didn’t hear from him for a long time. My mother started
to wear a washed out denim skirt pulled up over her chest like
a short dress and drink sweet red wine from green gallon jugs.
I escaped into my closet, where I built my own magical forest
with soft pillows and a collection of glass animals that I bought
at a local pet store with my babysitting money. One day I saw
a three-legged stray tomcat in the rescue cage there. The store
had taken in the stray cat and was holding it for three days
before they took him to the pound. I made it my mission to save
the cat. I carried signs around to save the cat. I hung posters.
Then, like a prince in a fairy tale, my father rode in on a white
horse and claimed that stray. He wasn’t allowed to have
pets in his Hollywood apartment above a Chinese restaurant. But
he did it anyway.
“Who are you?” he asked his eyes wide and frightened. “It’s
Patty, Dad.” Who are you, I wondered back at him and had
to stop the words from pouring out of me.
I stayed away from my childhood home, trying to ignore it like
bad background music in my life. I knew I was safer on my playgrounds,
in my teen crowds, and in my after school activities. My sister
ran away from home, getting picked up by the police right before
the people she had trusted sold her into a teenage prostitution
ring. I ran away to my student council, to my cheerleading, to
my boyfriends, and finally to my college parties and gin and
drugs.
I had convinced myself that I had escaped until I uncovered
my eyes and realized that I had married the worst of my father.
A dark man with a bandanna in his back pocket and an addiction
to scotch and hurt. After pounding me with sledgehammer words,
he would comfort himself by weaving the cool satin end of a blanket
through his toes, staring at the blank television screen and
smoking cigarettes until they burned his fingers.
I ran for the last time when I walked out on him. He had pushed
me down when he was drunk. While I lay at the bottom of those
steps checking for breaks in my bones, a future life flashed
before me- empty scotch bottles mixed in the trash with organic
baby food jars, children raised on good food and fear, carrying
this legacy of pain and fear into the next generation like a
defective gene. I got up and walked out the door, on a mission
to cure my disease.
I put down my gin and stopped moving to let the feelings catch
up to me. They flooded in like a tidal wave as the dam I had
built to keep out the past broke down. If I didn’t face
this now, I’d pick my father again and again—maybe
with blonde hair, maybe red hair, shape shifting into different
forms, but him nonetheless. I couldn’t live through the
pain of picking someone to hurt me again. I couldn’t run
fast enough to outpace this monster.
I put a pen in my hand and felt it move on its own, writing
and scratching and scrawling, purging on paper. A river of words
and hurt, of love and anger, of blood and sweat flooded the blank
white sheets. I wrote until my fingers cramped up in pain. And
then I licked a stamp and mailed it to my father. The flashing
red light on my answering machine finally came and I knew he
had called. I built up the courage to press the button and braced
myself for the retaliation of harsh words to slice through my
flesh with a serrated edge. But they didn’t come. He said
plainly and calmly that he had gotten my letter and then he thanked
me. The rose on the vine, but this time, he walked by it without
plucking it from its life source. He knew I was vulnerable to
him at that moment, throat bared, and he didn’t go in for
the kill. Instead he watered the seed I had planted. I was free
to walk down a different fork in the road. A path that led to
a different destination. Sun shining, he spared me.
I stroked his hand in mine now, warming it between my two palms.
He was afraid here today, knowing that his memories had deserted
him. It was his throat laid bare now, a position he had worked
his whole life to avoid. I stroked his neck and his eyes grew
wide.
I never answered that message he left on my machine, but after
that moment, I could look back and see other images in my past
rise to the surface like they had been written in magic ink.
I remembered him rubbing my belly when I had stomach aches as
a small child. A touch like a feather, I could feel him concentrating
on making me better. I saw him going through the aisles in the
empty theater after my first play, saving the playbills from
the sticky theater floor. I saw his scratchy red writing over
the pages of my stories, helping me to perfect my written words,
and inspire my lifelong passion for writing.
I saw him take in broken animals like himself and love them
back to health. When I was broken, he was there to listen to
my tears. He got strength from healing fallen birds, a reflection
into his own broken soul. Love isn’t a template. There
is no formula, like on the Brady Bunch. Everyone has their own
way. I looked back for the ways he loved me and let them absorb like lotion on my dry skin.
He transformed from Father, to human, the son of a woman who
beat him thinking that would make him strong. He was a man who
never answered the questions life asked him, unable to unroot
himself from the soil he grew in. As he aged, I grew stronger,
but still could only watch him from afar. I watched him shrink
into his woolen socks and Bermuda shorts, sleeping in his clothes
in case an earthquake struck. We imagine ourselves one way as
we live another, watching the people we could be walk beside
us like ghosts. If we had the courage. If we weren’t afraid.
I forgave him, but I never told him.
“I forgive you, Dad,” I leaned the words into his
ear. I could almost see them float across my hot breath into
his grayed ear.
Just like everything else in life, this wasn't a Brady Bunch
episode. There was no look of love or fireworks. There was no
immediate relief or a hand squeeze telling me everything would
be alright. It was a grey moment, like his skin. And this was
the end. I think he understood.
I’d keep his ashes in my closet, tied in a washed out
bandanna. And I’d name my second son Arthur, after him.
I’d call him Dad and know that he did the best he could.
I’d feel him in my home at Christmas, floating spirit and
curiosity, getting to know me, things he wouldn’t allow
himself when he lived in his body, weighed down by a mother who
beat him to make him strong and a father so beaten down by life
that he had no words left. I’d walk by his picture on my
mantelpiece and talk out loud to him. I’d thank him for
releasing me from our legacy.
My sons will be free. Free from the chain-carrying ancestral
ghosts that still haunt my soul. But I’ll have the strength
to fend them off, as I push my sons on swings and laugh out loud
in the sunshine.
[END]
© 2005 K.B. Quinn - Contributor's
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