The Lost Father (49 page)

I sometimes stood before a mirror and bit my lip, thinking, if.

Enough people had loved me, for a while, or tried to. But I didn’t want them. I made excuses. They seemed too small. I needed something else.

I’d tried and tried, for ten years now, at love. I’d tried the ones I thought I loved so much I didn’t even know and I’d tried the ones who were there, who, every time I saw them again, I winced. I’d had enough boyfriends to know it was something in me. And now I’d stopped.

I remembered my father calling me once to the car. The house stood a long way from the road. This was still my grandmother’s yard. He told me he would always be my father. No matter what. No one else could be that.

And nobody else ever was.

M
Y GRANDMOTHER LIVED
like a regular respectable woman of Racine, but she never liked to get out of her everyday clothes. She hated the fancy in life. She made fun of it all, oh, yah, sure sure, I got all such stuff, I’ve got the purse and the belt, matching, oh yah sure, I can go with the best of them, sure. A religious woman, she felt odd in church, with the lace veil resting on her head, the gloves, the belt and purse. She had the unfussiness of a woman who had been beautiful all her life. And I supposed she liked that—you could see that in her cheeks sometimes. But she also felt ashamed of being noticed. She was so shy, a man whistling at her outside the hardware store made her feel wrong, like a stranger’s touch would, as if they took something off of her.

I
N
M
ENOMONIE
, when I’d stopped for coffee, I passed an old woman standing in front of a restaurant studying the menu on a wooden placard. It was a vaguely health-food place, pretty cheap. She held a square white patent leather purse in both hands in front of her. I knew she was pricing things, trying to decide if she should go in. She was an unassuming woman, curled in a little, wearing a cloth coat.
When she noticed me looking at her, she startled a little, like a bird. I turned away. She wavered a long time. I watched from a little ways off. Now, my grandmother would have never been like that. She always stood straighter, the light of beauty fell around her, like a ring of petals, and she had enough money for a meal all her life, without worrying. When I remembered that, it was a consolation. The woman I was watching was more like me.

It took years to understand that I was not the same as my grandmother or my mother, that we were each marked at birth, as with a fingerprint on our soul and our faces, and that our lives, close as they were once in that white house, would move in solitary ways.

I
WAS VAIN ABOUT MY HANDS
. I liked my hands. I knew I was not a woman who could just wear anything and not worry about it. My grandmother wore men’s flannel shirts and an old plaid cap, she still looked herself, maybe more so, like a jewel set plainly.

I was always working at things. Stevie said once to me, “I love you because you try so hard.”

But my hands—my hands I didn’t have to do anything to. They were fine. I didn’t wear rings or bracelets and when I saw them, the way your body surprises you in mirrored lobbies or small oblique car windows, they pleased me.

S
OME OF THOSE
M
INNESOTA
towns were rich. The road wound around a lake and wide old-fashioned mansions stood looking at themselves in the water, a history of all power and peace. It was too late to be rich myself. Even if I was, it wouldn’t have been soon enough to save my mother’s life for anything. I imagined her sitting in the place with tiered lawns, like Beverly Hills High School was, but quiet, a thousand times quieter. Her in a green long robe, a sad expression on her face, sorry, but glad to see me, infinitely kind. She would have a hairbrush on her lap.

“Comeer,” she’d have said, “I want to brush out your hair.”

I let myself wonder again what we would have been. This was weak: I’d lapsed into the soft reverie a hundred times. By now, my wishes like that were all for the past.

J
UST OVER
the Minnesota-North Dakota border, I pulled to the side of the road for a Dairy Queen. It was a small old stand, its roof shaped to resemble the curved tip of an ice cream cone. Red picnic tables, their paint peeling, ranged outside on the blacktop. Mostly, I supposed, for the summer. Still, the sun pressed midafternoon bright now and there was just a thin drape of snow on the plowed fields. I bought a butterscotch sundae and sat outside at one of the wooden tables. The air was cold but clean, with a sharp hook in it. The sundae tasted good. Even in a chain like Dairy Queen, quality varied a lot. It depended on who owned it, how clean they kept the machines, what grade ingredients they bought, how much they cared. You never knew which stands were good unless you lived there. There was a great one in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin.

This was a real one. You could taste the clean high-alcohol vanilla, the butterscotch, the nuts were fresh. I sat, studying the little yellow plastic cup while I ate. Then a giggle near me took my attention, the way a bird’s call can sometimes interrupt even pure concentration.

The girl had a particularly long neck and a flat chest. Her shoulders sloped down. She had old-fashioned curly dirty-blond hair and a few pimples, regular bad-food pimples, on her forehead. On the East Coast or in California these would have been saladed and cleansered away, but here they just stayed, part of youth, like the late season flies on these picnic tables we shooed with our wrists but didn’t even mind that much. Under the table, her socked ankle stretched long and thin beneath the end of her jeans. Then his hand reached her foot, peeled the shoe off, and placed it on his lap. He was big cheeked—an Indian—with solid arms. He had dark eyes and eyebrows that slanted up. His features fell even and simple. From across and under the table, they kept moving, touching in different ways. His butt left the bench a second and he leaned over to kiss her.

“Don,” she said in a low, tomboyish call, because her wooden ice cream spoon had been knocked on the splintery table. Then he was back down and their hands toyed together. Now his foot roughed her thigh.

Oh. They were ten years younger, maybe more. In back of the small flimsy building a tractor started up with the hecking putt of its motor, we heard it jolt over the half-frozen fields. I finished my sundae still watching them, my spoon scraping out all the corners of the tiny yellow cup. Now they had long finished too but they still dallied there,
toying together, the sky the palest blue, clouds high and calligraphic above us.

I got back in the car and there was nothing else on the highway. I just drove awhile. I was jealous, of their fun.

Just two kids raffing and fooling on a picnic table.

A dirt road led off the dull highway and I followed it, stopping the car at the edge of the woods. Snow had started again. I just waited awhile there. Close lines of snow fell around the car on all sides. Past the birches and pine, I watched a silent valley, trees and a mud-rutted road. It wasn’t the world. I found the world beautiful, especially then. Snow fell in even stitches on the blue-green fir, the young white birches. I was just not right.

This was my only way of praying.

I tried to tell myself and remember: I had had my happiness too. My forty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four minutes of it. Some afternoons I’d felt all lined up right so the rest of life was in me and a part of me and I’d look at my hand and believe I was the same material, hair, skin, the cartilage of knees, gelatin of eyes, as the sky and the ground, the leaves stuttering with molecular press and collision, all of us built out of the color and substance, the paint pots of the periodic table, each a different weight, texture, feel, but still the same, endlessly breaking down and remixing. I believed that, sometimes.

The times like now when I drove to the end of a dirt road and sat holding the steering wheel, no one could see me and no one would ever have to know. I could bear it. I didn’t mind that much. After, I would be in the world again, caught under the big net of light and thunder and snow with everybody else. I started backing out, blowing my nose. Driving towards Montana, the road climbing, I began to think maybe this was the wrong way to be. Twenty-eight and fixed on one thing. Still, I kept going. When you’ve wanted to find a person long enough and you are closer than you’ve ever been, you can’t stop even if your faith changes. I would be better to finish, I knew that.

I began to count the things in the car, every time I stopped somewhere and got out. At gas stations where I filled up the Olds and used their bathroom and walked to the pay phone booth standing on the corner of the lot, I counted seven. The box. My purse. My earrings on each ear. The suitcase. Raincoat. My atlas. The umbrella I’d taken from Frank Lloyd Wright. And when I came back, from the phone
booth or diner or gas station bathroom, I’d count again. I didn’t mind anything, the whole trip, wasting time, if I wasn’t losing any more of what I had. Every time that machine clacked over my credit card, I was losing.

I drove with the window open, a sharp cold dry snow taste in the air. The pale luffing winter sky going on as far as I could see, I started thinking what I’d do if I were a bride.

I knew all that Emily was accruing.

If I were a bride preparing myself for something sacred, I decided I’d start a long time in advance and give everything up. That would take a long time. I knew how I wanted to die and I guessed, as I thought about it, this would be the same. I would try to make up something to the people I’d disappointed, to the ones I hurt or left. I would give away my things, one by one, taking care to match them with the person. I would tell my secrets, one to each friend, until the compartment was empty. It would be a sort of confession. Years before she died, my grandmother starting giving away her things. “Just take it,” she’d say, “I don’t use it.” But she never told her secrets.

Then I would make my days simple, eating little, drinking only water, keeping order among what I had, my few clothes clean and folded. I would own less and less. I would go to sleep every night early. I would give away more and more, write one letter each night before bed. Then I would begin to be ready. I would slip into the sheets, clean, with my hair brushed out. My bed would be solid and my sheets stiff. My stomach would be thin as a wafer. And I would wait like that a long time.

But sex in my life had never happened that way. That was a picture in a locket, an ancestor. I unlocked the door, shaking it, into the messy apartment, hoping the toilet’s flushed, wishing I’d kicked things into closets, and I turn the light out while we undress because I’m wearing the bad underwear, ones pink from the wash. It’s late, we smell the sharp grasping urgency of drinkers, the sheets feel gritty but warm, his skin is there, we begin and even unholy it is eternal, outside of time.

I
PASSED TOWNS
named Wing, Mott, Pillsbury, Fordville, Hamlet, Oberon, Warsaw, and Berlin. Every midwestern state has a Hague. I
drove through Mechanicville, Kellogg, Witoka, Money Creek, Pilot, Lark, Carson, and Killdeer. I almost turned and followed the signs to Yucatan, North Dakota.

The only place I could ever picture was my grandmother’s old house. I sat once with my grandmother and Paddy Winkler in the living room, each of us braced with TV tables. “Can I you get anything, Paddy?” my grandmother said, looking over to the television. We had it turned up, loud for him.

“Well, these waltzes don’t do much for me, Lil. But those taps, them I like. I heard that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the TV the other night too.”

She liked to watch dancing on TV. She followed the variety shows for the tap dancing. “Oooh, can he dance that little one. Listen to him go. That I like to see.”

Can he ever dance—this was high conversation in Racine. My grandmother copied phrases she’d heard and repeated them. She applied herself diligently to learning the forms so she could put as little of herself into the world as possible.

“Can he ever!” Paddy replied.

It was easy to feel like a genius in Racine.

Just then a squadron of teenage girls tapped onto the stage of Ed Sullivan.

“Oh, lookit there, can you hear, Paddy? It’s those little dark girls and can they ever dance. Even the real tiny ones. Lookit her go.”

Outside on the porch my mother was sitting with her friend Lolly, both hugging their knees and looking out at the sky. They were talking about beauty and the habits of men.

Bud Edison said once, “I always really admire a white guy who can dance.”

“Stevie can,” I said, almost like an accusation. Bud Edison knew about Stevie the way we both knew about each other’s loves before.

“I know what it is,” I said and I did know just then, all of a sudden. “It’s failure.” Things like dance were compensation. It was the same thing with jazz. Stevie went on for years, during vacations, and then we started up in Madison. Once when we were still teenagers, Paddy Winkler called the police and reported him as a burglar. He lay under my bed while they prowled out around the edges of the house with their flashlights. The next night he came back.