In Spite of Everything (26 page)

Cal and I had not slept alone in the same bed since we had had our babies. In the final four years of our marriage, we had not slept in the same bed at all. I was always in the kids’ room, in bed with them; Cal slept alone, in ours. There had never been reason to do anything else.

At some point, the meaning of my stepsister’s wedding present, our combined astrological chart, dawned on me: Being parents was the big cosmic purpose of our relationship. Before we had children, Cal had, consciously or not, operated as my parent. But Cal was an
actual
parent now. I had no pull; I had been severed. He was orbiting in an entirely different system now.
He didn’t want to
. He didn’t want to be with
me
.

S
ix months before my book was due to my editor, I got a call from my aunt. How long had it been since I had spoken to my dad? she wanted to know. I don’t know, I said. A while. The truth was that it had been quite a while, maybe more than a year. We had not really had much contact since September 11, 2001. I suppose that means you don’t know, my aunt said. Know what? Your father has bone cancer, she said. He has six to nine months to live.

My aunt’s phone call came in February 2005. Dad didn’t want us to come until summer. So we went that summer. They did not want us to stay in their house; we rented a neighbor’s vacant house down the street from them. Zanny, then four, trotted around, trying to talk to my dad; he barely at looked her. He was preoccupied with erecting a giant mosquito-killing contraption that looked like a 1970s movie robot. After a day of this, Cal and I took the children to a nearby farm to feed baby goats and sheep.
What did you expect?
Cal said. The next morning, we found a note on our windshield: “Thanks for coming. Love, Dad.” He was gone, had left for work at five-thirty that morning, his wife said, though we all knew he wasn’t working anymore. “Your father is not good at good-byes,” she explained, in a tone that seemed calculated to beam mysterious wisdom. I felt an angry dissertation welling up in me, but I smiled thinly instead and turned to strap the babies into the car.
Thanks for the visit
, Cal said.

The day after Halloween 2005, I called my dad. Pru had decided to go as both Frog and Toad, the eponymous characters of the children’s books. All night long, she had had an expression on her face that was pure Dad: his signature “give me a break” look. It was uncanny; Cal had remarked on it, too. Dad would like that.

As I dialed his number, I was walking toward the Brooklyn Writers’ Space, down Third Street in Park Slope. The sidewalk was mortared with candy wrappers, leaves, and indecipherable remnants
of costumes. It was chilly and clear, and though it was morning, the fall sun was already on its trajectory to set.

At first I thought I was going to get an answering machine. But after a number of rings, my father’s wife answered breathlessly, and on hearing my voice, she passed me to someone else. It was a hospice worker. “If you want to see your father alive, you should come within the next twelve hours,” she said. Ian, coincidentally, had called their house about an hour before. No one had planned on calling either of us.

By the time I got there early that evening, my father was in a coma. He was laid out in a cot in his bedroom, mouth open. His glasses were off. He was howling. The house seemed to be shaking with it.

His wife, sitting Indian-style in an armchair, said that she thought he wanted to be alone, that if he were an Inuit, he would have walked out into the snow by himself. I looked at her. I was not going to let my father,
my dad
, die
alone
.

For ten hours, I crouched at his side. I held his hand. I put my head on his chest. He wailed like Lear on the heath. It was a horror. I whispered, for ten hours: “You are not alone. I am here. It’s okay.” My Daddy-Doe. My noodler-in-chief.

When the sun came up, the breathing had become less regular, and the howl had quieted. My brother, who had been sleeping on the bed, woke up. My father’s wife materialized at the doorway. She sat on the bed and, petting their dog ceremoniously, informed us that she had consulted a medium a few months before, and that the medium had confirmed that she and Dad had not only shared their past lives together but would continue to do so throughout eternity. Ian and I looked at each other. After a long moment, I reminded Ian of a time we were all at the movies before our parents had split, when Dad had been in a really, really bad mood and had given my brother the popcorn to hold. My poor brother had been so nervous about the bad mood that he spazzed out with the popcorn, jerking a quarter of it all over the floor. Dad shot him an angry look, and he
sprayed it out all over again. Every time he did it, Dad would bark, “Jesus, Ian!” and all my brother could say was, “Jeez, sorry, Dad!” But he couldn’t stop; he was the oscillating popcorn sprinkler. Dad finally started cracking up, and the three of us had stood in hysterics in the lobby of the theater, with everyone staring at us, half-smiling in uncertainty about what sort of moment this was.

Ian and I sat on the bed giggling. Suddenly, Dad grunted. At seven-thirty in the morning, he died.

We had a small service. Then I drove home to Cal and the babies.

I
will not, and in any case cannot, describe what I felt on that drive. I will just say that I knew that my father had heard me as I sat with him. My abiding sense of being alone—cosmically alone—is, I now know, a direct result of my own parents’ savage divorce, coupled with my father’s alcoholism. How else could the parent with whom you were so closely bonded simply disappear, to be replaced by this Darth Vader figure? The only answer, in my addled little psyche, had been that love is
not
real. We are
not
actually bonded to one another; love does
not
actually make a stitch in the fabric of the universe. It seems to do so for a time, but it can be ripped out when you least expect it. The cosmic needle coldly moves on to thread together another panel. You are left alone, strings hanging out, fluttering off into the dark. Cal had changed this for me. Until my children were born, my connection to Cal was the closest I’d ever come to feeling what it must feel like to experience a miracle. I do not mean this in any maudlin or fuzzy way. I mean it actually. And I knew that my father needed me to be with him as he left life. I knew that my dad loved me, in spite of everything.

The night I came home from my father’s house, I turned to Cal in bed as he was reading. I felt an overwhelming urge to bind with him, to lock souls. Thank God, I said, we didn’t have to suffer like my father. Thank God we weren’t alone! He turned to me, nodded, and then kept reading. I waited, thinking he was finishing a paragraph.
But I ended up falling asleep. For days, weeks—nothing. I went numb. A few months later, I got a serious case of pneumonia, which lasted nearly twelve weeks. I spent a lot of time on the couch, in and out of blackout sleep, with my children coming to hang out and read with me, Cal watching TV. Wow.
He’s really gone
, I remember thinking at one point.
We
are
alone
.

T
he arc of my life story tracks that of many in my generation; I’m a dime a dozen. But in the particulars of the dissolution of my own marriage, I am—everyone is—unique. By the end of my marriage, I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. Cal had not been able to “find time” to read the book I had written, and he was explosive at any disclosure of my confusion or hurt. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn’t had sex in months.

Yet I never considered divorce. It never even entered my mind. I just figured that this was my life. I was, by and large, okay with it. At this point, I had a number of good friends—many of them other mothers in our neighborhood—and that comfy camaraderie provided
a soft lining. I had found a resting place for my adolescent mania: I loved my babies.
Loved
my babies. I was grateful that they had a perfect father, for our family meals, for the stability of our home, for neighborhood playdates.

Still, I felt it.
The ogre will come in any case
. I was beginning to feel it at night in the girls’ room when I was still awake with a boo-boo snoring sweetly at each side. During the day, I was content with work, children, playdates, laundry. But once the sun set, my mind froze in panic. Grendel, it seemed, was just beyond the fortress gates, waiting for everyone to fall asleep.

I had to stay alert; I had to get us out. I instantly picked up my pace. But out of
where
? To what? Rather than progressing in any one direction, I manically pitched myself this way and that—like a metronome with no weight on its pendulum. Move, move,
move
.

Maybe our apartment was too small. The girls were getting bigger. The rooms were tiny; the “nests” were more like pods. We needed more space. We should move to a real house. I had grown up in a house, until my parents divorced; Cal had always grown up in a house. The girls deserved to grow up in a house, too. We should buy a house. Now was the time to do it; our apartment had appreciated, thanks to the kitchen renovation. We could sell our place for double what we paid for it. Think about it. We could afford a
house
now—not in the Jersey suburbs, not in some shitbag Brooklyn dump! A
nice
house, in
our
neighborhood!

This time, it wasn’t Cal who churned frenetically about real estate; it was me. My dad was dead. I had recovered from pneumonia. My book had been published. Now I had time. I searched for a house every moment I had free. What was I doing? I was moving. I was thinking literally. House hunting was not symbolic. We
needed
to get out of the apartment; we did not
fit
there;
that’s
what was wrong. I
needed
to find a house. More than that, I needed to find
The House
—like The Magnolia Tree.

Room. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice. Dad. House.

The House would protect us.

D
uring the summer before we separated, Cal and I sold our perfect little apartment. We’d always hallucinated about buying a house, but we knew we’d never actually be able to afford one—never mind one of those classic early-1900s four-story Brooklyn beauties made famous by
Moonstruck
. But somehow, we had done it. For one thing, we’d gotten tapped by good real estate karma during the housing bubble, and we
were
able to sell our apartment for double what we’d paid for it five years earlier. I found a beautiful fixer-upper for well under market value. It was an estate sale, and the seller had cheaped out by opting to go with a schlubby local realtor rather than one of the carnivorous Manhattan-based firms. With no advertising in
The New York Times
, the house was flying under the radar; I swooped by, and we snatched it up. For another thing, we’d done pretty well financially, especially considering that both of us worked from home and arranged our work hours to fit our kids’ schedules. We had made it—again.