The Best American Essays 2016 (31 page)

But something about that makes it sound innocent and misrepresented. Yes, he felt that America was the land of opportunity, but not so much for its constitutional guarantees as for its being the perfect place, maybe the only place, for a street-savvy man with infinite charisma to exploit the good-natured and hospitable extensions of the people he needed for survival. My mother was one of the first, a waitress who had long struggled with her weight, self-esteem, and troubled childhood; she served as the perfect person to pitch a campaign of false love on. I’d seen him haggle car salesmen down thousands of dollars on multiple occasions, men trained to be impervious, shaking their heads and my father’s hand as he talked them into an undoable deal. I can only imagine that my mother, who had never seriously dated a man, stood no chance against his persuasive platform of bullshit and charm.

Photos of my parents from the early years show them grinning, stuffing clichéd cake into one another’s mouths. Smiles all around at taking me to the park for the first time as I fearlessly chased swans deeper into their pond. But the real trouble comes when one knows the end of a story first; now when I look back on those early, gleeful pictures, I see only a ruse. While my mother tells me there were moments of genuine happiness, I can never forget that my father needed a green card more than anything, and my mother, who was subsequently subjected to totalitarian ruling, was ripe for the picking. And like any actor worth his weight, he played the part of the family man convincingly for a time.

Sit-down family meals were stressed as important in my childhood, always beginning with a prayer and sometimes ending with an Aesop’s fable thrown in for good moral measure. But it didn’t take long until, even when I was a very young child, I noticed his talking about specific waitresses too often. Casual droppings of Connies and Jennifers at our dinner table, each mention of their names making me more uncomfortable than when a sex scene crept on in a movie we were watching together. Soon after, the blame was placed on conflicting work schedules, and we sat down to eat together as a unit only a few times a week.

“Can I have more potatoes, please?” My father held his plate toward my mother, though he was technically closer to the stove than she. He winked at my brother, Mike, as she rose and took his plate. “Did I tell you kids what Jenny said at work last night?”

Mike and I exchanged a glance, a checks-and-balances system to figure out when things were rhetorical.

“She’s so funny,” he said and ran his hand through his curls. My mother placed his dish, potatoes piled high, in front of him, and he smacked her ass lightly in appreciation. “She came up and said that there was this old guy at her table who kept pinching her, so she grabbed my arm.” He paused to flex his enormous bicep. “She said, ‘You’re the only real man in this place.’” He laughed proudly, his gold tooth showing, and turned to my brother, six years old at the time, and whispered playfully so we all could hear him, “Jenny’s one hot number.” He continued at regular volume: “Man, the other cooks weren’t happy after that. Especially Jenny’s boyfriend!”

Polite smiles all around, but I kicked Mike under the table.

“Can I have some more chicken?” he asked, and my mother rose to fetch.

My father spoke about Greece with fire, his accent thick as stew, recounting its perfect green sea, plentiful olives, and passionate people, but his descriptions were never concrete. Not really. It was more like listening to the recollections of dreams, that space of bleary disconnect, when he’d recall life in Crete, mixing his fact with fantasy just like they did in Greek school. In fact, until I was about twelve years old, I really believed in the Minotaur and Medusa, though I’d abandoned silly notions of Santa long before. The fiction was so intertwined with the facts that it seemed real. I never questioned it. And a shrine to his island,
his
Crete, hung on my parents’ bedroom wall and solidified the truth about the far-off land he called home. A painting proudly displayed the topography of Crete, a cluster of grapes in one corner, a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull in another. Only recently has it occurred to me that he really could have been from anywhere. I do think of him as quintessentially Greek in almost every way, but he could’ve just as easily watched three or four Russian movies and sold me on visions of vodka-drenched snow and tall bearskin hats. I rarely saw pictures from his childhood, though I knew he had two sisters, because they visited us in the States when I was a child. I never understood who lived in the house he grew up in—or even if it was a house. I had no idea what his parents did for a living or, for that matter, where my grandfather had disappeared to, since my father spoke only of my
yia-yia
. But more importantly, I never questioned those gaps. He seemed fabricated, a character sprung from the pages of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
, and though I’ve spent most of my life trying to deny the biological fact, he was indeed my father.

When I was fifteen years old, before the divorce was final, before the police had to physically remove him from our home on that last court-sanctioned day, I had it out with him. His demeanor had always been a threatening one—biceps too thick for me to wrap my hands around—but anyone with a history of physical abuse can tell you that the temporary pain of getting hit is nothing; it feels deceptively avoidable and bruises fade. But the emotional and manipulative torture lingers, like an extra ingredient in the body that can never be shaken. Just a couple of months before the final eviction, my father and I, the only two at home, were in his bedroom, that shrine to Crete and Orthodoxy, and with the ruddy icons staring out from behind their encased glass, he threatened me with body blows as I jumped on his bed. When he raised his hand to hit me, a familiar bent elbow, a flash of knuckle, I used the give in the bed to spring into the air and kick him with both feet square in the center of his chest. As he fell back onto the dresser, loose change cascaded to the rug, the wobbling mirrors distorting our confrontation. I told him, yelled at him, for the first time, that I hated him: the first shouted smile of my life. Pure joy in defiance, in the bare truth of the word
hate
. And then, as he attempted to regain his balance, I grabbed my backpack and ran, spending the night in the woods across the street from our home, perched behind a log that allowed me to see my parents’ frantic search while it was too dark for them to see me. All fires need time to burn out.

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.