I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (6 page)

Helen watches as I go through the pictures, here and there filling in names, and details, and places. She’s sitting in a nearby armchair, nursing a whiskey-Seven. But even though we are only three or four feet apart, she hardly even looks at me, I mean
really
looks.

After talking to Phyllis, maybe I know why.

JUNE AND I ARE JUST TWO DOORS AWAY
from seeing Daddy—our door and his. The guard is unlocking ours right now, and we are ushered into a large visiting room, perhaps seventy-five feet long and twenty feet wide. There are chairs lining the walls, and each is paired with another chair that faces it, separated by a little brown Formica-topped table with silver legs. The table is the Rio Grande. It looks like just a hop, skip, and a jump to the other side. But it’s another country over there. You can’t put your body on the other side, except to hold hands.

Unless you are a little girl. Then you can sit on your daddy’s lap all day, and no one says a word.

The waiting room is full—since we’re so late—and we have to cram ourselves near the far end of it. Once there, it’s another ten minutes or so, while the inmate goes through whatever process is required before the door at the other end of the waiting room opens and he walks through it. The anticipation could kill a person.

Seeing him appear behind that door is just like when a contestant is introduced on a game show. The door slides open and Daddy’s standing there, with a giant smile on his face. I watch him stride toward me, giving a handshake or two to fellow inmates who are
also receiving visitors that day. I can’t help but notice his impossibly shiny shoes and freshly pressed shirt and pants. Freddie always looks fabulous. It’s part of his brand.

By this time, all that excitement has turned on me and I am quaking with bashfulness. June is giving me a little shove at the rump, but my legs aren’t cooperating. The closer Daddy gets, the harder it is to make eye contact, until—

I’m swept up toward the ceiling in a large arc, and before I know it I am flying overhead, looking down on my dad, my feet artfully outstretched. All those hours I’ve been logging down at the Jenny Lind Elementary ice rink (it’s just the baseball field flooded with water) have obviously paid off. Everyone’s watching us like we’re the 1971 Russian Olympic pairs champions. Then, just as gracefully, my feet land back on the floor.

That’s when he attacks me with smothering kisses.

“Give your dad some sugar!”
He’s shouting.
“How’s my little gyurl?”

Honestly? I could use a Dramamine. This is all way too much. I stand there, staring at a crack on the floor, with a stupefied smile on my face.

“Let me get a look at you, gyurl.” My dad steps back and gives me the once-over. He’s got a checklist of things we have to go over about my appearance before we can get started. Sort of like when you get a rental car and you have to initial any dings before you drive off the lot or pay dearly for them when you get back.

“Didn’t I tell you not to stand like that? C’mon now.” He tilts my hyperextended knees from their weird double-jointed position back to straight. This is always the very first thing he says to me, so it’s not quite as harsh as it sounds. Besides, I agree with him. It looks really dumb when I stand like that. (I’ve never thought to tell him this, but he’d be proud to know I
never
stand like that in my adulthood. Parents try, you know. And sometimes it works.)

There’s a first prize for my dress and an honorable mention for my anklets-and-patent-leather-shoes combination. Then we take our
seats, June on the visitor’s side and Daddy on the prisoner’s side. The visit has officially begun.

And we’re in time for the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Man alive! Things are gonna be okay after all.

The visit passes in a blur of playing cards, vending machines, cigarette smoke (other people’s, not ours), paint-with-water books, Barbies, and whatever else I brought in there to play with. There’s the occasional frown from the guard when I get too loud or too rambunctious. I can’t help it if it gets dull when June and Freddie are talking about grown-up things like attorneys, and sentences, and parole, and my dad’s case. They also talk about other McMillans, Linda, me, my schoolwork, my social workers, and the Hennepin County Welfare Department.

And before you know it, it’s over. Usually, not a moment too soon. Visiting is exciting, but in the most boring possible way. I get a wavy feeling in my stomach when it’s time to say good-bye. It’s a little harder and more forceful than the sick feeling I get on my way in. I guess because I know I’m not going to see my dad again for another six months.

At the end of visiting hours, the inmates are allowed to make physical contact with their visitors. Since most of the visitors are women in love with inmates, the closing minutes can be quite an eye popper. I think I even saw a boner or two. Or at the very least, felt a lot of boner-type energy.

I, for one, am okay with that.

Because all that intensity gives me something to pay attention to besides this terrible feeling, already traveling up my arms and through my ears and into the back of my eyes:

I miss my dad.

IT’S BEEN THREE MONTHS
and I haven’t looked at that dating website again, but I haven’t forgotten about it, either. I’ve been
too busy working my way through the tail end of this stupid breakup with Bryan, which is turning out to be a much bigger deal than I would have thought.

There’s a saying: “If I’m hysterical, it’s historical.” Any time my reaction to a thing is wayyyy bigger than the thing itself, chances are I am dealing with a core issue, something deeper perhaps than losing the best guitar player I’ve ever collaborated with.

Lately, it’s all I can do to go to my part-time TV news job, make my son’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, drive him to kindergarten, and cry my eyes out until it’s time to pick him up again.

I’ve cried so hard and for so long I know it can’t possibly be about Bryan, since he was actually a little bit of a dweeb who may have been smart and handsome and talented but was hardly a guy anyone would mistake for my true partner. Except maybe me.

Obviously, I am grieving a much bigger loss. Of Daddy. And Mommy. It shouldn’t surprise me that this breakup has triggered it—this is the first of all my breakups since college where
the guy
dumped
me
. No wonder I’ve never allowed this to happen! To paraphrase the old saying, it’s better to have loved a little bit less than to have loved a lot and been left afterward.

I am doing all kinds of things to “get over it,” not realizing that there
is
no getting over it. There’s only getting through it. I spend my thirty-ninth birthday naked, in the pitch-blackness of an Indian sweat lodge (improbably located in a backyard in Van Nuys), getting in touch with my spirit animals and working through my abandonment issues. I would put quotes around “spirit animals” and “abandonment issues” but I’m not even joking. I broke it down in there. Or maybe I just broke down.

There’s another saying: “Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, because eventually, they’ll get in touch with you.” Yeah, they will. Through your spirit animals.

Fall of 2003 passes in a veil of tears, and by New Year’s Eve leading into 2004, I’m ready to let it all go. I leave a lame party at
12:02 
A.M.
and go home to perform a ritual I heard about where you write down every single thing that you want to let go of from the past year on little slips of paper. Then you officially Let Go
^TM
of those things by burning the papers in the flame of a candle. You feel like you are in a New Age bookstore when you do this, but you don’t really care because you also feel like you are
doing something
to bring about desperately needed change, too.

Then, on another set of little slips of paper (this ritual involves a lot of little slips of paper, which is way better than involving chicken blood), I write down everything I want to bring into my life in the coming year, setting the intention to receive it now.
NOW!

At the top of my list: a love relationship.

It’s a big deal that I can even acknowledge this. I’ve spent my life looking for and finding relationships (or is it hunting down and killing them?), but nevertheless, it’s hard for me to say out loud that having a man, loving a man, being in a long-term, committed relationship with a man, is really important to me. Maybe because I grew up in the seventies, where I heard that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Well, fuck that. I’m tired of being politically correct. I need a man; I’ll just say it.

So yesterday, I went back on that website, ready to not just try harder but to try differently. The first thing I did was search for “that guy,” the one I’d seen while using Lisa’s password.

He’s still there. In his loft, downtown.

My heart beats a little bit faster as I get out my credit card and pay the fee, then upload my picture and write a short, sweet profile.

I like pale blue water, vintage things, and places I’ve never been.

Then, I “wink” at him.

I’m nervous because once I click that mouse, I know that I am stuck—I can never get that wink back—and whatever happens from here is out of my control.

But I shake that feeling off and go on with my day.

MY DADDY IS HOME!
He got out on parole, after four years in Leavenworth. All of us—June, Gene, and the five Ericson children—went down to the airport with balloons and a hand-painted banner reading welcome home freddie! When he stepped through the airplane door into the terminal, I rushed into his arms. It was a lot like my favorite TV show,
Truth or Consequences,
where guys coming home from the war are reunited with their trembling wives on national television. The only thing missing was Bob Barker.

Daddy has moved into a halfway house and we’ve been dating seeing each other regularly. Sometimes, he comes for Sunday services at Hope Lutheran, looking fly. After church we walk down the block to the parsonage (that’s what the minister’s home is called)—my dad in his platforms and Qiana shirt, surrounded by the Ericson girls, who are all dressed for a Billy Graham Crusade. At home June has a pot roast surrounded by carrots, potatoes, and onions in the oven for Sunday dinner.

Other times Daddy and I go out together, just the two of us. Mostly, we like to drive around. We say we’re going shopping, or fishing, or to the zoo, but what we really do is turn the radio up and roll the car windows down, and get our cruise on.

My dad’s car is huge, with doors so big I can’t shut them by myself unless I’m standing up. The seats are white leather and the windows go up and down automatically when you push a little metal doodad on the armrest. It’s awfully cool. And a long, long way from that new Mercury Comet the Ericsons just bought.

“Can we get some beef jerky?” I ask.

I love beef jerky. It’s salty and chewy and I like to chew on things. It gives me something to do with my nervous energy.

“Absolutely,” my dad says as he single-handedly swings the steering wheel, the size of an extra-large pizza, in the direction of the corner store. “Whatever you’d like, darling.”

I don’t ask my dad for things as much as I put in a request. There’s never any question that I will get what I have asked for, as long as it’s within reason. It’s just a matter of time, which means there’s no need to wheedle and no manipulation necessary. It’s not that he’s trying to buy my love. It’s that he doesn’t see any reason to deny me.

“And can I get some Pixy Stix, too?”

I love beef jerky, but I’m
obsessed
with Pixy Stix, the powdered SweeTart-like candy that comes in a paper tube decorated with a colorful swirl. Pixy Stix are the crack cocaine of candy. Pure, unadulterated sugar, laced with tangy ascorbic acid. So addictive, you might as well just smoke the motherfuckers. Or shoot them up.

“Sure, little gyurl. Pixy Stix, too.”

We head over to Humboldt Drug, where usually I have to shoplift my candy because I need much more than the Ericsons think is reasonable. In minutes I am contentedly munching on leathery beef as we drive around North Minneapolis, listening to soul music on the radio.

Until my dad and I started chilling together, I didn’t even know Minneapolis
had
a soul station. “Me and Mrs. Jones” is my favorite song. It has a sad melody that matches the way I feel inside a lot better than Andy Williams’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” or whatever it is that June is always listening to in her car. I also like
“Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays and “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” by the Four Tops. My musical taste apparently hints at my emotional life—all about lying, cheating, and being left.

“Can we go to the record store?”

“Sure, baby,” my dad says, “we can go to the record store.” It’s just a normal sentence, but when my dad says it, it sounds like he’s about to start laughing. My dad thinks everything that comes out of my mouth is terribly amusing. He has this way of looking at me when I talk—he pays very close attention, much more than adults usually do, and he listens very carefully, smiling but not mocking. The most accurate word for it, I think, is “delight.” He delights in pretty much whatever I say.

I already know what I’m going to get—the new Sonny and Cher record. My dad has bought me every single one of their albums, except for the one from Cher’s fur-vest-and-straight-bangs era, which I don’t want. The new album has pictures of the inside of Sonny and Cher’s Beverly Hills mansion—all blue velvet upholstery and sumptuous furnishings—which I will spend hours poring over, in an early intuitive form of creative visualization. I wouldn’t dare tell anyone this, but what I really want to be when I grow up is Cher. One time I told one of my social workers this and she gave me a very funny look. So now whenever anyone asks, I just say I want to be a nurse.

We walk out of the record store loaded with music. In addition to my new Cher porn, I’ve got a half-dozen 45s: “Little Willy” by Sweet, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence, and “Sing” by the Carpenters. I’ll play them on the turquoise portable record player my dad bought me a few outings ago.

“Hey, baby. You want to go fishing?”

“Yeah!” I shout. My dad knows I love to fish. It’s pretty much the only time I’m able to sit absolutely still.

But it’s too late to go get our fishing poles and buy some worms and head to Cedar Lake to get in a boat for some real fishing, so my
dad pulls over near Shingle Creek (locally pronounced “crick”), a tiny riverlike body of water that wends its way through North Minneapolis. (South Minneapolis has its own crick, called Minnehaha Creek.) It’s sunny out, and little bits of gold dapple the surface of the water where the light is filtering through the elm trees. The creek is too cold to really step into, but there are little pools of shallow water near the edge where it’s fun to stick your hand in and pull out a pretty rock. Sometimes if you break them open, they have the mesmerizing concentric circles of an agate.

“Look!” I blurt out, pointing at a school of minnows that has taken up residence in a tiny eddy. “Baby fish!”

I’m really excited. But it’s not enough for me to just witness the beauty of the minnows. I want to catch one. I try to trap one of the wriggly little suckers in my cupped hands. I’m not even close.

“Wait a minute,” Freddie says. I turn to see him trekking back up the short embankment toward the car. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

He’s back in a jiffy, toting a glass jar. I have no idea where he got it. Maybe he just drives around with old jars in his big car. Probably it had something disgusting in it that he likes to eat, like pickled pigs’ feet or some other nasty Southern food.

“Go ahead and catch one,” he says encouragingly. He gives the jar a quick rinse by swishing cold, clear Shingle Creek water around inside of it. “You can put it in this,” he says, tossing me the jar.

Ghetto aquarium in hand, I run along the creek’s edge, stopping every so often to scoop up a jarful of water and checking to see if there are any wriggling little fishes in there. My dad runs along behind me.

“Did you get one?” he asks. He’s almost as excited as I am.

“No,” I say, submerging the jar again. I pull it up to eye level to see if there’s a minnow in there. Nothing. Except leaves, and sticks, and dirt. I am bereft. “I’m
never
gonna catch a minnow!”

Freddie laughs at how emotional I am. “Just try again,” he says.

I do try again, and again, but each time, I come up empty. “I
can’t,
” I wail.

I’m not a little girl with a lot of perseverance. I think if I don’t get something the first couple of times I try for it, it means the gods have chosen some
other
little girl for the honor of catching a minnow in a jar. Like maybe Buffy from the TV show
Family Affair
. She (and her ilk) seem to have been chosen for
most
of the honors.

“Keep trying,” my dad offers. “You’ll get one.” He seems so certain.

But every attempt is coming up empty, and it’s starting to feel personal. “They won’t let me catch them!” I’m frustrated now and getting near tears. My feet are soaking wet, and the watermark on my jeans is hitting somewhere around the knee. I’m cold, too. Spring in Minnesota is like winter everywhere else.

“Tracy Renee,” he says, sounding almost impatient, “put that jar in the water and catch a minnow.” He’s really firm about it, which takes me by surprise.
Catch the damn minnow;
that’s the tone of voice he just used. I find it scary and liberating to be expected to succeed and not allowed to fail, simultaneously. It gives me permission to let go of my well-worn view of myself as the helpless little foster child who can’t get what she wants and fully commit to the idea of having the minnow.

Of
owning
the minnow. I rent everything. Even parents. (And later, husbands.)

I don’t know how to get what I need, much less take what I want. And the Ericsons can’t teach me—they’re much too Swedish for that sort of thing. But my dad knows how. In fact, he’s so sure he deserves what he wants that he’s even willing to steal it (which I don’t condone). In a strange way, his willingness is exactly what I’m going to need to survive the life he has, through his choices, tossed me into. It’s not that I need to be willing to steal, it’s that I need to be willing to go for it, to want something and to think I deserve it.

“There they are!” I spot the school of minnows again and pitch myself forward, almost falling in as I bail a full jar of water out of
Shingle Creek. Like a desperate forty-niner panning for gold, I hold the jar up and there, swimming contentedly in the murky water, is a tiny little minnow.

“You got it, baby!” My dad’s jubilant. “You got one!” Freddie’s gotten a little messy in all the excitement: his green leather shoes have a ring of water damage, and there are specks of gray water spots on his polyester pants. “Bring it here. Show it to your dad.”

He peers into the jar. “There he is! Your minnow.” He claps and takes a big swig of air that makes a deep resonant sound of glee in his throat. He obviously approves. “A good-lookin’ son of a gun, too.” Freddie laughs big. “What are you going to name him?”

Name him? I never thought of giving him a name. But it only takes me a second to come up with something. “How about Mrs. Jones?”

Freddie looks like he’s going to fall over with fatherly pride. From the expression on his face, I’m the smartest, most amazing girl on the planet. “Mrs. Jones it is, then,” he says, without mentioning anything about gender reassignment. He gives me the cover to the jar and I screw it on, so I can take my trophy home. June and Gene are going to be so impressed. On the way home we listen to Stevie Wonder sing about the sunshine in his life and I think to myself that I got one.

It might be the first time in my short little life that I got one.

PAUL WRITES BACK RIGHT AWAY.
“Could you be more gorgeous?”
That’s what he writes.

Could.

You.

Be.

More.

Gorgeous.

Um, yeah. I probably could be. Or at least I could
have been,
until this moment. Now I’m suddenly feeling pretty gorgeous. The rest of
his note is short and sweet and to the point:
“I would like to take you to coffee.”

And so you shall. Take me to coffee.

I meet him in the Art and Architecture stacks at Borders. His idea. Which I think is inspired, romantic, and creative. I don’t think it means he prefers fantasy over real life. It also has the added advantage of being a relatively discreet place since I’m pretty mortified to actually be hooking up with someone I met online.

I’m careful to get there just a few minutes late. For my outfit, I’ve managed the neither-here-nor-there, not-too-much-or-too-little, not-too-sexy-or-too-prim, not-too-high-of-heels-in-case-he’s-short blind date outfit conundrum so well, I will not even remember what I was wearing a week later.

“You’re beautiful,” he says sometime in the first minute. He’s gazing at me.

I blush. “Really?” I think this is such a charming and vulnerable thing to say. I don’t think it’s seductive or calculating.

“Yeah, really.” He’s still gazing. “Really,” he repeats. That awkward date feeling descends upon us, but he, thankfully, breaks the silence. “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure!” I’m grateful for the distraction of being able to walk and talk.

We head for the café, which gives me a chance to check out his outfit. There’s a green vintage dress shirt, which I’m liking, topped with a corduroy vintage casual overcoat. Nice start. His bottom half could use some work, though. He’s wearing “designer” jeans, which (unfairly) I have a terrible prejudice against, even though I own a dozen pairs. I’m partial to slightly oversize Levis 501s on men. Anything else seems vain. Like they succumbed to a Diesel ad, unconsciously hoping they would get that Amazonian Brigitte Bardot–lookalike chick if they wore those jeans. And his shoes—a zip-up ankle boot with a little too much heel—are also a bit suspect. But the rest of him is pretty cute, so I decide to let it go.

At the café, there’s a line, so we stand in it.

He starts telling me about his four-year-old son and the “great” relationship he has with his baby-mama, who is also “really great.” I’m not thinking that if it was really that “great” a relationship they’d still be in it. Nor do I know yet that he would regularly like to murder his ex and that she would like to murder him right back. I won’t find that out for a while, and by the time I do, I’m pretty sure that, since my love is so awesome, it will all get resolved.

We get our coffees and sit down at a table near the window. He’s jabbering—literally—about the presidential election, John Kerry, and the primary, but I don’t think this is because he’s obsessive. To be honest, I’m not really listening. I have a borderline hand fetish, which means I’m paying an inordinate amount of attention to his fingers, which are long and slim (but not pointy), the kind I like, maybe because mine are thicker and more square. His nails are dirt free and clipped to the quick, which I’m also partial to. I can just tell he has good handwriting.

The “discussion,” quite frankly, is one-sided and boring, and he hasn’t really asked me anything about me yet, but I don’t think this is because he’s narcissistic. He also has a strange quirk—he punctuates his conversation with cartoon noises, like
woo-hoo!
or
hee-hee,
said in the manner of Dudley Do-Right on a day when he was doing wrong. It’s kind of annoying, but I don’t think it’s part of what noted psychologist Donald Winnicott would say is an overdeveloped false self. Or in this case, possibly underdeveloped.