The Lost Father (16 page)

I was nervous. I guess that was it. Or maybe I was always like this. I looked at my hands with wonder. They looked big. Maybe I was always this bad.

I rolled my bike to the Pleiades Palace. I didn’t want to ride anymore. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t have an umbrella or a hat so my hair was flat strands on my forehead and over my ears by the time I got there. Elementary school kids in bright-colored hooded slickers fidgeted in a long line. You could hear the zup of their rubbery sleeves and boots, making squeaking noises. Timothy ushered them in the way he ushered anyone, bending down to take tickets, making conversation. The kids settled in the movie seats, unbuckling galoshes, dropping coats.

We stood behind the velvet curtain listening to their swaying voices. “It’s all happening so fast,” I whispered. “I wanted to find him all these years and now this really might be it. And I don’t know if it’s even a good time. What about Emory? He expects everyone to leave him. And school.”

“The projectionist’ll close up,” Timothy said. “We can go.”

He took his jacket off the peg and opened a black umbrella over us as we walked outside. We headed down towards the river, trees tenting over us, the choral rain echoing on all sides. “And I don’t know,” I said, “lately I’ve been liking my life here.”

“What makes you think it’s going to happen so fast?”

“This detective sounds like it might. Yesterday they were checking computers in five states. He said it could be any day now.” He’d called again today, panting on the phone. “I’m gonna get him, I can feel it, I’m gonna get him soon”—his breath going almost creepy. “Oh, by the way, you said to hold your check for a few days and it’s
been three, so I’m gonna go ahead and put it through, awright?” The money had come from the Racine National Savings and Loan, with a note from the president saying
Prudence! When this goes, that’s all there is
. I knew him. He was my grandmother’s friend Jen’s brother-in-law, Homer Hollander. The bank building had white pillars and the names of the virtues carved at the top in stone. Constance, Prudence, Charity, Pride, Honor and Hope. Good families in Racine named their daughters these things. Their sons they called Lewis and Donald. It seemed I was giving away my share of the bank at home, and what would I get for it?

“Even if he shows up on a computer,” Timothy said, “that’s not necessarily going to be his current address, they’re going to have to cross-check, send somebody there or call …”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid. Tonight I’m not even sure I want it.”

He put a hand under his ponytail, pulled the rubber band out and swung the hair free on his back. He kept the plain liver-colored rubber band on his wrist. His wrist was wide, the bones round. His cuff touched my cheek. The old suede chafed rough on my skin like a man’s face, this time of day. “You know, you don’t have to see your father when you find him. You’ll have all the information. You can wait. It might be enough just to know.”

“Yup.” I guessed that was the advantage of me finding him, that I could take my time. But even there, he had me. “He seems like such a wily guy, though. What if I paid all my good money and found where he was and then, by the time I was ready to go, he’d’ve moved again. Then I’d have to start all over.”

It had stopped raining. Timothy took the umbrella down. And the sky thickened to that liquid deep blue it did just before it was really dark and lights came on, the bridge lamps and strings of lanterns across the river making the buildings over there look like a small carnival. I still wasn’t used to eastern light and weather.

“Will you go alone?”

I shook my head, sending water flying. “Who would I take?”

“You could bring a friend. Stevie. Or Emily.”

“Naa. I’d have to bring my mom or somebody who knew him. And she’s not into it.”

“No.”

“I kind of want to go alone.” I’d have rather had someone. A brother or a sister. The way it was, my family things were an embarrassment.
After all this time it was still hard to be different. And the being different didn’t go away ever. But that was my life: alone. There was a spare thrill to that, too.

“I wonder where he’ll be.”

“The West somewhere.” I shrugged. “Some people you just know aren’t in the South. And I can’t see him in the Middle either.” I knew a lot of places. I’d had years of driving. Now I was settled down to my dark apartment and quiet books. “He tried Wisconsin. And Michigan. Like it won’t be Arkansas or Texas or Georgia. Not the plains. He’d never be in Boston. I haven’t seen him in so many years but I still have all these ideas. Maybe he’s nothing like I think. Maybe he’s right over there in New Jersey.” We stood looking at New Jersey a moment, the green banks, rich from rain.

The sky and water were hardening into their colors, their edges making one sharp line.

But I knew he wasn’t in New Jersey. I absolutely knew.

I’
D LEFT
my door open again.

I rolled my bike in, pitched it against a wall. I walked around in the dark and just touched things, all my old furniture. I had the feeling you might get knowing you were about to receive a summons to pack up your belongings. My breath came from the top of me, a high, almost giddy kind of waiting. I squeezed the shoulder of my grandmother’s couch the way I would a person. Maybe I could have liked this life. I was leaving before I really got to know it.

What had been abstract, diffuse, so one night it was the spell of a vast deep sky, the touch of a stranger’s two fingers on my neck, could become everyday and of this world. I’d need to buy a plane ticket. I’d have to travel, maybe stay in a hotel, rent a car. What would I bring?

Would I even take my life here into consideration? Wait till it was a good time to leave school, get someone to fill in for me at the hospital? I should really get a haircut, lose six pounds, get my clothes in order, pay my bills. Once I went over to Stevie Howard’s apartment in Madison when he was packing, the bed was a ravage of clothes and dry-cleaner cellophane. A huge suitcase was half full on the sheets. Talcum was spilled on the floor and the open bathroom yawned male smells. His apartment was no better than mine. He’d gone shopping that day. We were still the age when we bought our new clothes for
going home. Or everybody else did. Not me. My mother was different. When I went to see her I’d see just her. There weren’t friends and parties, none of that. There wasn’t even a house. She lived in a rented backhouse she couldn’t afford and still, there was no room for me.

My father, I couldn’t see staying the same place long. I’d paid the detective my money, I’d better jump on a plane and do what I needed to, before he disappeared again.

It would be his time, not mine. All these years, he lived everywhere, the eye in the seed, pollen in the wind. That was different and maybe easier. Now, if he was going to be a man, just wearing brown clothes, living in some city, then it seemed things should be fair. My turn and then his turn. But we never would be fair.

I held on to the back of my rocker. I didn’t want to go. Anywhere. I loved my small life, unwatched and unbothered, just as it was, one more night. I loved it for all I hadn’t given it.

I collapsed on the gray couch, one hand on my belly. I hadn’t had sex for more than a year now. I had never been pregnant. And I hadn’t been perfect either. It was weird. I always felt proud of that—no abortions. It was another kind of virginity. But now I was twenty-eight, and it was something I worried over a little. Why hadn’t I ever been pregnant? Most of my friends had. I’d wanted to, deep at the center of a few nights.

Stevie had had two girlfriends who got pregnant. When Mai linn was seventeen, the artist in San Francisco used to cry out, “Ooch, I want to make you pregnant.” Once she brought up the subject the next morning while he sat cross-legged on the bedspread unballing a pair of socks. He made his bed every morning and then ironed the shirt he was going to wear that day. He patted her belly and said, “It’s enough just to think it.” She told Stevie and me that she wanted his baby. Stevie looked at her like being pregnant with that asshole’s child would ruin her. His name was Kevin June. I believe in naming the names of assholes.

Bud Edison asked me once, “Are you preggy?” I’d never heard that word before. I thought he’d made it up. He’d thought up the idea of me being pregnant because of what I was eating. Then he said, “You can’t imagine any circumstances so that you’d be married in the next year?” His voice worked like a knob turning the whole room forty-five degrees more still and permanent.

“No-oh,” I said, like of course not.

I hurled onto his lap, my socked feet on his knees. I was like that with him. We’d be in his apartment, allegedly working, books open, and I kept looming across the room falling on him. It wasn’t desire exactly, it wasn’t that. I imagined large twelve-year-olds throwing themselves on their fathers, all girl.

I pulled at his sweater. It was an odd blue. “Can I have this?”

“I can’t give that to you. It was Asia’s father’s.” He’d had a real girlfriend before me. She’d gone to Reed College and her name was Asia. She’d left him. It bugged me, her power.

“Was her father dead?”

“No.”

“So why was she giving away his clothes?”

“She just gave it to me,” he said, picking at a thread. “It was nice.”

Once, later, we really thought I was. He called every morning to check. I hadn’t told him about my fasting and my insides. Most of my friends had had abortions already. We didn’t talk about what we’d do. I suppose that was what my parents did. They never planned their lives. I didn’t want to have a life like theirs, but I didn’t want to be one of those sensible people from good schools either, planning every test of their lives as if there were nothing higher. It depressed me to think—this was all there was.

I
PUSHED UP OFF THE COUCH
. I slid in the gloom around tables and then dialed the detective, standing in the dark, undressing. First I rubbed off running shoes with my heels, then peeled down socks, shirt, jeans, underwear. It was still ringing. I looked at the underwear. The elastic was frilled from so many washings. I was getting to an age where I wanted better. Young and poor was invisibly changing to just poor.

“Yeah,” he answered on the fifth ring, and then waited, like I had something to tell him.

“I’m just calling to see if you found out anything?”

“We’re working on it, you gotta be patient, these things take time. And so far he’s not coming up in any of the states we’re checking for license or DMV. He’s just not there.”

“Oh, okay.”

I angled my hipbones past the corner of our old Formica kitchen
table. I knew how to move through the tunnels of my apartment, without hitting myself on edges. I collapsed again on the couch. It was the same furniture, the same darkness, the same lights and moving-wind string instrument noise outside. A siren coasted down from the neighbor’s TV upstairs. I jammed open the window.

Everything was different.

I
LEFT THE LIBRARY
at midnight, riding my bike in the dark, wind separating my clothes from me a hand’s width like a knife under the peel of a fruit. I would pay the bike ticket. I’d call the bank about my card tomorrow. Replace the water glasses. I had ajar. I could drink out of that, I didn’t care. I’d talk to the anatomy teacher. Go back to work in the morning even though it wasn’t my day and see if Emory’d repaired his tower. I’d try this life a little longer. I’d try and forget the butterfly pin because I’d have so much else to do. I hauled the bike in, took my earnings out, put them on the table. But I really did think I’d lost the butterfly pin. It was gone.

This was tedious. He was locatable. It would take time and patience.

But I was not as near as I’d thought. Maybe I was no closer than I ever was.

And then I had that feeling again of when the first blood comes. You’d call him on the telephone—he’s relieved too, you talk soft child-voiced awhile, sweetakins, words you never use, then you sigh and hang up. It is evening, night. Outside, you hear the glass edges of screams, the gay lift of a teenage crowd. You tell yourself, actually say the words, you did not want to be. Not now, anyway. Honey, we really couldn’t have handled it now, you know that, he said.

I know.

The apartment feels close. You open a window. Air is anyone’s. You are a woman in rooms which have been other, strangers’ rooms. Paint is such a thin light way we make ourselves feel clean. Like skin, you can scratch right through it with a fingernail.

You lie down fully clothed on the made bed, your high heels falling off onto the floor.

When. When will your life begin?

M
Y DAYS IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
numbered. A month ended, six weeks. Jim Wynne seemed to dwindle. He had that oh-it’s-you in his voice when I called. All the money I had didn’t seem enough to keep up a man’s interest long. By week four I told him I wanted to see him. He said there was nothing to talk about. “These things take time,” he said.

I tried then to go back to my life. How many times had we come back? After the promise and glitter of tiara and throne. Twice, when we lived in Wisconsin, my father called and my mother and I got on planes and visited him in the West. And then we had to go back, to her work and my school, after our slight wingbrush of glamour. Or just when we called in sick and spent the day dressing up and getting ready and waiting, and then he didn’t come. Our regular life looked different after we’d left even for a day. Walls grew up around it. Even daily life requires our allegiance in order to include us.