It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (6 page)

“What are you doing here?” I said.

He smiled. He must have assumed that as a kid who rarely had a parent to pick her up, I would be thrilled. Instead, I was aghast. If
horrified
had a “Which emotion am I?” poster in a psychologist’s office, it was my face.

He had come to pick me up. To ride along beside me as I walked home from school. I waved to my friends and their parents, letting them know I didn’t need a ride, and began the walk. He followed, keeping up with my chubby-legged superstride. I asked him to “Please, please, please, please, take off your hat.”

“Wha—no! Why? It’s cold out.”

“It’s so ugly and I hate it and … you’re embarrassing me.”

I paused and then said, “I want you to go away.”

“Andrea, c’mon. That’s crazy talk.” He offered a sheepish smile, continuing to pedal.

Adamant now, I stopped. He braked as I turned to face him. “I don’t want anyone to see me with you. I don’t want you to ride beside me.”

And with that, his eyes changed. I could see I’d wounded him. His mouth hung slightly open, as if he had one last plea in him,
but, oh, never mind
.

I walked away from him, heading right as he steered slowly left. I didn’t turn around. I felt so sure of myself in that moment, so positive that I was making a necessary decision. I believed that avoiding embarrassment, all the dreamed-up humiliation in my head, was worth pushing away a dad who came to pick me up from school.

An hour later I’d made it home and was unable to acknowledge the shame, the guilt, of what had happened earlier.

I lingered in the doorway of the kitchen, spilling a cereal supper, and looked at him, seated at the dining room table. He looked back at me and I could see that he’d had a drink when he had gotten home. His eyes looked cloudy and glazed. I wondered if what I’d done had made him veer his bicycle up North Street to the liquor store.

He turned back to the table, and I looked down at my floating Apple Jacks—milk logged and bloated. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed, so quietly that no one could hear.

I thought briefly to sit with him, but I walked to the den instead, face downturned to my bowl, tears salting the peach-hued milk.

For months he continued to drink in the same reckless way he always had. Then spring came, and he went missing.

Two full days passed before the phone rang and Mom rushed to the kitchen to answer it, while I ran to the one in the living room to catch it, somehow both of us knowing it would be him.

“Mere,” he began, his voice unsteady.

She stretched the coiled phone cord from the kitchen wall all
the way down the hallway and leaned into the living room where I was. With her hand over the receiver, she told me to hang up. Her eyes warned me against protesting. I placed the cordless phone back in its base, and she hurried out of the room.

Impatient, I lasted one minute waiting in the living room before racing down the hallway. By the time I reached her, she was off the phone. She told me to get my coat, that we were going to get Dad.

I pressed her for details, and she gave me a desperate look. Her eyes scared me. They darted around the room frantically, as if looking for Anthony, who was out with his friends. “Francie, Dad … tried to kill himself.” Her words rolled out like an apology. He had checked into a motel by the highway, where he swallowed a full bottle of pills and drank a handle of vodka.

Dad entered Tewksbury State Hospital. In the weeks that followed, he underwent intensive group and individual therapy. He was sober for twenty-eight days straight. When he returned home, he told us he’d met a guy in the hospital who became a friend. That friend had a place out west, in Arizona. Dad was sure he could go to the desert, stay with his friend, stay clean, and then come back to us a new person. He said he just needed to get away for a while. He’d come back—he promised—just as soon as he got his feet on the ground again.

In June he took a train westward with nothing but a box of Saltine crackers and called us from Phoenix three weeks later. We heard in his voice that he had been drinking. His sentences were choppy and nonsensical. He asked Mom to send him money to take the three-day train back home. And when she did, he came back to us.

For one full year, from that summer of 1995 straight through the following spring of 1996, Dad kept leaving for and returning from Arizona. Every month or so, I’d hear Mom on the phone with him, agreeing to send him whatever money we had. Each time he returned to us, he’d inevitably find that staying sober in Medfield was worse than drinking alone in the desert. He convinced Anthony to apply to Arizona State University, saying that the Southwest was going to be a great place for the two of them. And despite Mom’s pleas and tears, Anthony went with him in the fall. I hated that part of the country, if only for the reason that it had lured them both away. I realized that their leaving took Mom away, too—to work. I kept the televisions on in every room of our empty apartment to combat the loneliness that comes with silence.

When the next June came, and I was a blink from finishing sixth grade, Dad called. I knew from Anthony, who saw less and less of him the longer he was there, that Dad was drinking heavily. I even knew that Dad had, on more than one occasion, drunkenly humiliated Anthony in front of his friends.

And now he needed money again. He needed to come home, I heard him tell her over the phone. She didn’t have a dime. Part of her knew that it was best for Anthony, who had decided to take a semester off from school, and me that we not live with an alcoholic, albeit our dad. The other part of her loved him fiercely and wanted him home, safe and sound regardless of sobriety. She also remembered the three previous times she’d sent him that same money.

“Rob, I’m sorry, I can’t.”

With that, she passed me the phone. My heart raced, not knowing whether to support her decision and act like a grown-up,
or to tell him that I missed him and wanted him home, which was the truth. He asked me to convince Mom to send him money. He told me how much he wanted to come home, how different things would be this time.

“But Dad, you never change … you never get better. Mom’s right.” I choked on my own words. “You shouldn’t come home.”

And through the spiral telephone cord, I felt his eyes close. A nod. I heard what he didn’t say:
I can’t believe you said that, Andrea. I hate you for saying that, Andrea. But … I know. I know
. And as I told him I had to go, I felt my throat close up. I felt as though I’d swallowed my heart.

On Sunday, November 23, 1997, the night before I was supposed to have read all of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
for English class, the phone rang. I sat on the edge of Mom’s bed as she picked up her bedroom phone.

She turned to face the wall, and I stared down at Dickens. I heard the phone click back in the receiver.

I looked up at her, ready to tell her that I hated reading and Dickens and seventh grade, but her eyes stopped me. They said it before her mouth could. “Dad’s dead.”

I ran to my room and sobbed into the clothes hanging in my closet. I hated the feeling of the fabric against my face. I wanted to tear all the clothing from its hangers. I hated my First Communion dress and how roughly the coarse white material rubbed against my wet cheek. I hated Mom for wanting me to save it, since she’d had a wedding dress cut down to fit me. I hated that since the dress was a women’s size twelve, she thought I could probably wear it again when I grew up. I knew how impossible that was—and
how no one wears their First Communion dress again after second grade. I thought of how everyone just gets bigger as they grow up. And then I hated that, too.

When I search frantically through my memories of the rest of that night, I can only hear two sentences: the ones Mom said to Anthony and me in her bedroom. “Dad died last July in Arizona. He had a stroke, and they found him at the train station.”

I scan the days that followed. I remember odd bits and pieces of the time, little snippets of phone calls, my brother’s face, the hunch of my mother’s heaving back as she lay in bed facing the window the next morning. That time is like a scratched CD, the song coming in and out of lyrics and harmonies. Fragments of melody at best. The whole month of November 1997 is jagged and disjointed and holey.

But I clearly remember the food. I remember the J.J. Nissen blueberry muffins that my Nana brought that Monday morning. The way the moist muffin top sort of gelled to my fingertips. How I finished two and smashed the empty wrappers between two cupped palms on my way to the trash can. I remember the creaminess of 2% milk and the tart zing of ice-cold Newman’s Own Lemonade. I can’t remember the exact conversations, the dress I wore to his funeral, what my brother said in his eighteen-year-old’s eulogy, what I told my seventh-grade friends when they called and asked if I could do a part of some project for class on Wednesday. I can’t remember crying more than twice.

All I can think of is the gummy crumbs of a store-bought blueberry muffin. The oversize rings of oil that bled through the white parchment-paper muffin liner. Thanking my Nana and Aunt Margie for bringing us a haul of groceries.

The way I swallowed then, when I needed anything but to feel, was precarious. Desperation and regret. A sharp gulp. A jagged clump of blueberry muffin in that space between my tonsils, working its way down to rest in my belly. It’s hard to tell if it’s a knot of tears welling in my throat, or a hunk of food that has barely been chewed before being swallowed. The knot sinking lower and lower, like a tennis ball being pushed through panty hose.

I’d eat this way, hard and purposeful, all the days following his death. I found momentary relief in discomfort of another sort. In feeling as if my stomach could sate that hole where a dad, alcoholic or not, used to be. The muffins, those bloated Apple Jacks—I pushed them forcefully into my mouth with the hope that they would distract me.

But they did not.

They could not.

I ate as ragefully as I felt. I swallowed uncomfortably. I kept my head bent and hanging, to my bowl, shamefully. I filled myself desperately.

Food numbed me.

I wish I remembered his face as precisely as I remember eating the muffins, one after another, the morning after Mom told me he’d died. I wish I hadn’t found out that the reason we didn’t know where Dad was for five months, two weeks, five days, and nine hours—since I’d told him not to come home—was because he was homeless and without any form of identification on him. I wish he’d had more than two pennies in his left pocket. I wish he hadn’t been sleeping in a boxcar in the scorching desert heat, after drinking himself into oblivion. I wish they hadn’t had to identify him by his teeth, and that they hadn’t just put him in a simple pine
box and misplaced his file, forgetting to call his next of kin until November.

I wish I had a better photograph in mind when I think of him now than the one the coroner sent us to verify that the body they found, homeless and alone, was, indeed, Robert F. Mitchell. I wish his eyes had been closed in that picture, or even cloudy and sweet with booze again. Anything but scared and cold and gone.

When I wanted to forget that picture of my broken father, I ate. I hung sweet and savory pictures over the ones that haunted me. I framed the food instead.

I LEARNED TWO VERY IMPORTANT THINGS
in the wake of Dad’s death. One was that losing him meant I could also temporarily remove the name tag I’d worn for years that read “the fat girl” and replace it with something more compassionate: “the girl whose dad died.” Kids passing me in the hall would offer a look that said
I’m sorry, and not just because I laughed when they called you a wide load on the bus last week
. I’d return a silent thank-you and realize that none of it mattered anyway.

The second thing I learned was that school was the only place where I wasn’t alone. And I began to love it for that reason. I began to crave it.

The sadness I felt then, and even sometimes now, blares within me. It’s an all-encompassing, piercing sound—a fire alarm. It shrieks so loudly, I cower. I seek refuge by covering my ears. I think briefly about ducking beneath a stairwell, hoping its shrillness will be muffled if I hide from it. But it finds me, always. It finds me
when I’m in the shower or walking on a treadmill; it wakes me suddenly in the night. It forces me to uncover my ears. And I hear it while trying not to listen to what it means. The pain, the sound—it’s deafening. After listening for so long, I become immune to it. The urgent alarm turns to a hollow ringing, a monotone that feels far away and permanent. And sometimes, though the dull pain in my ears reminds me, I can make myself forget I’m hearing it at all.

Eating made me forget. The flavors, the textures, and smells entertained me enough to mute my other senses. Filling my belly stuffed my mind so completely that no space existed for sadness. Packing myself with sweets until I ached created a new sensation, one that had nothing to do with intense loneliness and broken dads.

The kitchen, too, made me forget. That galley in our apartment had become the only space at home I could tolerate. The cramped quarters felt comforting. Staying in there prevented me from lingering in the vulnerability, the wide-openness of reality.