Outer Banks (16 page)

 

W
ELL, THAT'S WAY
behind me now, and I've forgiven him, forgiven him for all of it. Really. I have. Part of it was my fault, I'm sure. I mean, I didn't understand him very well, so it was hard for me to give him what he really wanted and needed—though I'm not sure any woman would have been able to give him what he wanted and needed. He was lonely, terribly lonely, I could tell that much. I could understand that. A stranger in a strange land, like they say. No friends, except the few rough pals he made at work. No family, and unable to be in touch with his family in New Hampshire because of what he was sure he had done to his father. And Florida was just not the place for him—he said he was a man of cold winds and ice and snow. I remember him telling me that, very serious, as if he was telling me he was Catholic or Methodist or Episcopalian. He hated the heat, the sun, the white light of noon, said it made him shrivel up inside, said it made him feel closed off from the world. He was always complaining about the palm trees. “They're not trees. Why d'yer call them trees? They're giant weeds, that's what.
Weeds
,” he called them. And he disliked the people who lived here, called them “crackers,” even when they were from places like New York or Ohio. “Life in Florida,” he would grumble, “is like living in a motel full of crackers.” So actually, I wasn't surprised when he left Florida. I expected it. What did surprise me, though, was that he did it alone, that he didn't take the two of us along with him, his wife and his baby.

We hadn't been getting along for quite a few months when he left—not since I first told him I was pregnant, as a matter of fact, and you were three months old when he left, so that means we hadn't been getting along for about a year. But I had blamed that pretty much on myself, on the pregnancy and all and the way I was right after you were born, the way I was all wrapped up with being a mother. Like I said, he was lonely, and after I got pregnant it was hard for me to help him not be lonely.

 

O
H, WHAT AM
I doing this for? What's the matter with me? I sat down here to tell you the truth, and I'm not doing it, I'm lying, sliding over things, leaving important things out. I'm not telling the truth at all. It's just that I don't want you to be hurt by him any more than you already have been. But I can't keep on lying to you.

Life with your father was horrible for me right from the start. First there was that affair with Polly Prudhomme. Then there was the drinking. And after that there was all the violence, the fighting, the times he actually hit me. Then came the silence. He went silent on me. Shut everything down and just sat in his chair, reading sometimes, or looking out the window, or leaning back, his hands behind his head, and looking at the cracks in the ceiling. When you were born, he would come into the room where I was sleeping with you, and he would stand over your little bassinet and stare silently at you, no expression on his face at all. It was the strangest, scariest thing I had ever seen. It was as if he had died or something. I started going a little crazy from it. You can imagine the pressure it created, that silence, his expressionless face. I'd sob, “Do you love me?” and he'd say, “Sure,” just that, as if he was answering a question about a new hat I'd bought. “How do you like this one, hon?” “Fine,” he'd say. Except that I'd be sobbing, “What do you
feel
about me? What do you feel about the
baby?
” And he'd look up from the newspaper and say, “Fine.” No expression at all on his face, no depth in his voice. Well, I know I went a little crazy from it. I'd sometimes find myself in the middle of the night lying on the bathroom floor, my face pressed against the cold tiles of the floor, sobbing hysterically, “Why don't you
leave
me! Get out! Get out!” And he'd be at the door, leaning casually against the frame of it, looking down at me with a strange curiosity in his eyes, and he'd say, “Fine.” The next morning, silence.

It went on like that for many weeks until finally one morning
I got out of the bed I slept in, looked over at his bed and saw that it was already made, thought I'd overslept, and rushed out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. He was gone. He never left before seven-thirty. I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven o'clock.

He never came back. He didn't love me. He didn't love you. You were only a baby. He never even told you any nighttime stories or sang you any songs. You were only a baby. He should've loved you for that at least. But he didn't. I loved him. He might have loved me back a little for that. But he didn't. So he left us. Packed a suitcase, walked out, got on a bus, disappeared. He left me with some money in the bank, and once he wired me a hundred dollars from Colorado. Six months later, I got a typed post card from him. It said:

That was all. Six months later we were legally divorced, and I never saw your father again, though, as you know, I did hear from him again, numerous times. But I was lucky enough never to have to see him again.

There were the post cards he sent you, but you also might as well know that your father called me for years afterward, usually late at night, often on a sentimental occasion, like our anniversary or my birthday or yours. He was always drunk when he called, and because I would be less than enthusiastic, he'd turn sour and angry almost immediately and would hang up on me. I never bothered at the time to tell you of these calls because you
were too young to have understood, and he eventually stopped calling, probably when he was with his second wife, whom, I'm told, he loved intensely for a while, though frankly speaking, I don't believe it.

Your father beat me at least fifteen times in the year that we were married and living together. By “beat me” I mean hitting me more than once on any given occasion. I'm not counting all the times your father hit me only once.

 

Y
OUR FATHER SWORE
and cursed at me constantly. He mocked my clumsiness when I was great with child.

 

Y
OUR FATHER LAY
in my own bed with my best friend, Polly Prudhomme, who also happened to be my boss until I was too pregnant to model even the maternity dresses and had to quit my job at the store. He told me about it after everyone in the store and practically everyone in town already knew about it, and then when he told me about it, he gave me all the details of their times together. He praised her especially for her skill at giving him what he called “head,” which meant sucking on his penis (you're old enough to know all this by now) and letting him ejaculate into her mouth and, he said, she swallowed the semen, though that's a little hard for me to believe. Yet he insisted that's what she liked to do and that she did it so well he almost became addicted to it. He told me they even had a code worked out so that he could make an appointment with her by teasing her in front of me, and I remember, when he came to the store to get me after work, his saying to Polly, as if he was teasing her about her name, “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?” And she'd laugh and say, “Naw, not tonight,” or, “Later, maybe, after supper for dessert.” I would scold him afterward for making fun of her name. “Besides, she doesn't know what you mean by ‘cracker,' ” I would say to him, and he'd just laugh, knowing that actually I was the one who didn't know what “cracker” meant.

Your father drank whiskey until he passed out on the floor, and he always did it on nights when he had promised to take me out to dinner and dancing.

 

Y
OUR FATHER HAD
a fistfight with my only living relative, my Uncle Orlando—beating him senseless in his own front yard in front of his own wife and horrified children—all because Orlando had enough courage to stand up to your father and tell him what a selfish and cruel man he was to be treating me the way he was then (this was only a week before your father left me).

 

Y
OUR FATHER BRAGGED
about his abilities as a pipefitter. He had no humility. He was convinced that, compared to him, all the men he worked with and for were stupid, lazy, and unskilled.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
frequently impotent, sexually inadequate. I won't go into it any further than that because there may well be reasons for it that we can never really know about, matters outside my experiences with him, childhood experiences and that sort of thing, but your father, I thought, was not quite right sexually. He talked too much about some of his friends' (men friends, mind you) muscles. Also, he seemd to enjoy a certain kind of intercourse which, I'm told, only homosexual men do regularly. You know what I'm talking about.

 

Y
OUR FATHER HATED
cats. I won't tell you about how one time he killed a whole litter of kittens. It was horrible.

 

Y
OUR FATHER CHEATED
at cards. Even bridge.

 

Y
OUR FATHER STOLE
government property.

 

Y
OUR FATHER LIED
about his taxes. He also told strangers that he made more money than he really did make. Sometimes he even
told them he was making money on the side by playing the stock market, betting on the horses, betting on dogs, winning sports pools, bowling. He had me believing (until I had my lawyer check it out later) that he owned a lot of real estate in New Hampshire. “Half the side of a mountain,” was how he put it, but my lawyer told me that your father's parents owned an old rundown farm, and your father owned nothing.

 

Y
OUR FATHER THOUGHT
all flowers were ugly, though he once admitted he liked blue hydrangeas. “Mainly because they don't look like they're real,” he explained to me.

 

Y
OUR FATHER DIDN'T
know how to swim. He said it was on principle, but of course it was because he didn't want to be in a position of having to learn something that most people already knew about.

 

Y
OUR FATHER DIDN'T
know how to ride a bicycle, either, and that too he said was on principle. I could never understand that.

 

Y
OUR FATHER HATED
people of all races, creeds, and colors. He was an extremely prejudiced man, the worst I have ever known, even after living my whole life in the South. He would make fun of a person's background, no matter what it was. “Stupid Polacks.” “Grabby Jews.” “Dumb niggers.” “Drunken Indians.” “Thick-headed Irishers.” He hated them all—even what he himself was, which he referred to as “common white trash” or sometimes “snot-nosed Yankees” and “backwoods New Hampshire shit-kickers.” But whenever he used these terms, he somehow said them with a certain note of endearment. Somehow these slurs became affectionate nicknames. Not so for the others, though.

 

Y
OUR FATHER COULD
play the saxophone well, but he only played it when he was alone or thought he was alone. He did not, as he claimed, play in the Guy Lombardo orchestra. He often referred
to himself as “one of Guy's Royal Canadians” when people asked him about his saxophone, which he displayed ostentatiously on the coffee table in the living room of our apartment.

 

Y
OUR FATHER HAD
a smile that people loved, and when, because of their love for his smile, they got close to him, he stopped smiling and never allowed it to be seen again. I cannot recall his smiling at me after we were married, and actually, I can't recall his smiling at me from the moment I told him that I was falling in love with him, which happened the fourth time I went out with him. Of course I know he must have smiled at me then, many times. It's just that I can't recall it.

 

Y
OUR FATHER TOLD
wonderful jokes, but only to strangers. When he told jokes to people who were not strangers, the jokes were cruel and dark and only funny in a way that made you feel guilty if you laughed.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WOULD
sneer at old people on park benches as if they disgusted him.

 

Y
OUR FATHER KICKED
dogs and dared them to bite him for it.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
a jaywalker.

 

Y
OUR FATHER GROWLED
. Like an animal. At night, if a car drove up, or if someone knocked on the door, your father would start to growl, low and deep from way back in his throat.

 

Y
OUR FATHER OFTEN
ate the same thing for lunch that he knew I was fixing for supper.

 

Y
OUR FATHER LIED
about having been a champion boxer. He was, however, a very good, that is, a successful, barroom brawler.

 

Y
OUR FATHER LIED
about having been a champion runner, though he did have very muscular legs and seemed never to be physically tired, so he probably could have been a champion runner if he had tried. But he never even tried.

 

Y
OUR FATHER THOUGHT
he had killed his father, but he never confessed to having any guilt for it. He blamed it on his father. Otherwise, he never talked about it with me. I'd ask him to tell me about it and he'd say, “It was all my old man's fault,” and then he'd roll over and go to sleep.

 

Y
OUR FATHER TALKED
incoherently to himself when he was drunk, and he was drunk at least one night a week, usually Friday night, after he had gotten paid.