The Lost Father (8 page)

All this time, I had been trying to get away from her, but it chased me, something, I couldn’t get free. For one thing, she was in trouble. The convalescent hospital she’d been working for had been closed. There was some kind of investigation. I didn’t think she was working and I couldn’t see how she would be able to afford her life. She didn’t tell me much, she just hinted. I hated thinking about it, I was afraid to let myself imagine what would happen. This had been going on for a while now and it would probably go on a long time.

That Thursday I left the hospital early. I forgot about finding my father. My mother had already stopped it so many times in my life and now this. But she didn’t even know. All she knew was she was getting her femininity cut out.

It was a wind-bright autumn day, changing, and I needed to get home and pack. Four o’clock light gilded the city behind me, all points and towers. My block still seemed a quiet forgotten neighborhood subject to a different lower light. At the corner, a wrought-iron fence protected one small churchyard and a poor row of flowers. The walls of the stucco church curved out convexly and all the windows were boarded with green shutters. The stucco took on a violet hue. I didn’t want to go. But I never liked to leave anywhere.

I packed and dressed and carried my old suitcase with me. In the elevator my upstairs neighbor stood with his cane. It was reddish wood, silver-handled. At the ground floor, I offered to help him with my arm.

“I don’t need,” he said. We walked together outside. “Cane just for looks. New York everybody push and shove, steal my taxi. I use cane, the people they just look and say oh-oh old man, and they very nice. Keep away.”

A film was running at the Pleiades Palace, where I stopped on my way, and I pushed the heavy velvet curtains aside to get to Timothy, sitting on a high stool by the ticket booth. He had a tiny light there. He wasn’t watching, he was reading a big-print book.

“So it’s cancer again?” he said, looking up.

We just stood there a minute, the words and pictures moving below us like an outside rain.

I
COULD IMAGINE
her doing absolutely anything anywhere. It seemed to me on the plane that day that whatever you imagined was true when you knew someone deeply enough. You can see them many ways they will never be and still, you are right—it is true. When I was young I used to mimic people, but that is not what I mean. I am not talking about imitating a tic or a limp or a way of talking. When you know a person to the bottom, nothing they do can ever surprise you.

Your understanding of them is not bound by the limits of time or geography or circumstance or luck. I know my mother in prison, if she is never in trouble, never caught, I know her in bed, though I have never seen her with a man that way and what I know is not what she has told me. I know her married safe with money, though that will not happen to her anymore in her life, it could have, and I know the generous luncheon parties she would have given, frantic with flowers.

We all own many existences besides the material one we are occupying now. But what I am talking about is not reincarnation. Because each version of ourselves, each possible manifestation, lives around us, like a circle of our own children, apparent to those who know us best.

You can probably know a person like that once or twice in a lifetime. I hope it will happen to me again, with a man. I’ve sometimes, for a few moments, thought I was close. It seemed different, then, with a man, the way I love. But now I think that silvery quality to it, that solitary gasp, is not knowing a person. And that the way I know my mother is deeper than gender.

Perhaps families of six or eight children get more. Or maybe my mother and I had something wholly extraordinary between us, with our clairvoyance. But I could stun my mother. She never knew me the way I did her.

I wanted to picture my father those ways. I tried to. Because my father still could have been anything. I tried to see him rich, in a suit, showing me down the machine aisles of a factory he owned. I have been in factories and office buildings, but I couldn’t see him there. I could see other people I’d met before in the world. I tried to picture him a bum. I couldn’t really do that either. My mother and other people too had always told me he was a man with women. I tried to see that. Him in bed with a woman, lifting up under her hair, his ministrations. But I couldn’t. What I saw wasn’t him. All I could do was substitute other men, men I’d known.

I tried teacher, doctor, politician, traveling salesman, driving. Nothing would come. All I could sense was a presence stationary in a chair, me stamping around the room in white, accusing, his face a still draped rag, showing no movement as I accused without time. He would never be as real on this earth as she was, even if I did find him alive.

In six hours I was at the place where my mother was. LA. Somewhere I couldn’t save her. It was hot. Overpopulated. You knew just as you stepped off the plane. A kind of soot seemed dispersed in the air. I came out and looked over the expectant crowd of faces like so many balloons. Always, walking out of an airplane even if I knew no one was waiting for me, I couldn’t help but look.

She wasn’t there so I kept walking with the line that seemed to know where it was going. Maybe she was at the luggage conveyor. I’d brought only carry-on. But she wouldn’t assume that. She always came to see me with two huge perfect suitcases too big to carry.

When she wasn’t there at baggage claim, I ran to a phone booth, paged her, all the while looking around, worrying I was in the wrong place and wanting to get out. Then I just gave up and didn’t care anymore, like dropping a piece of paper. I was going to be in the airport for a while.

It was a freak show, LAX. People looked like demons in their clothes and their hard hair.

I stood at one of the doors, just outside. My mother was getting her femininity cut out. The palm leaves, high above, moved just a little, up and down in the sooted heat. In the distance I could see metal
fences, random concrete, long lots of cars with strings of little plastic flags and the curved big freeway on-ramps.

Finally, the white Mercedes screeched to a stop. She didn’t see me yet. She was all out in one jerk, standing with her hands angry on hips, surveying the world. She looked the same, straight up and down, with sunglasses. I took my time, my jacket looped from the peg hook on a finger behind me.

F
IRST SHE TOOK
me on an errand. Something about the car. She left me sitting in an auto shop forty-five minutes while she was outside, standing by the open hood, pointing, talking to the submerged mechanic, riding him it looked like. This was just like my mother. I was used to it in a way. Even though I hadn’t seen her for two years. The couch where I was sitting was greasy and taped. There was nothing to read. One
TV Guide
with the cover partly ripped off. A girl calendar on the wall. There was time like this, just time.

“Well say something,” she said later, driving the way she drove, full of gasps and skids and halts. “Ooh, watch out, I didn’t see that.”

I didn’t say anything. I fingered the window well.

“I had to do that,” she said.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Well, to the doctor, what did you think?”

It was a small square building, a kind of feminist women’s practice, a place I was surprised to see my mother, and the doctor looked gay but I guess she wasn’t, she had pictures of a man with kids. And when we went in it wasn’t cancer at all but precancerous cells, she didn’t need chemotherapy or even a hysterectomy, just her cervix scraped the way my friend Mai linn already had, when she was twenty-five.

We were sitting in the doctor’s office.

“I thought you said you had to have radiation,” I said to my mother.

“I didn’t say that.” She shook her head. “Boy, you sure imagine things, brother.”

She had to go into the hospital the next day. Sunday morning, she could go home. I already didn’t want to be there. I felt tricked. All I could do was count off hours.

We had brilliant fights, with an arc of night. I kept wanting to go home. “Take a taxi,” she screamed, from the backhouse, where I heard things fall crashing around her, “damnit, damn you!”

I was sitting out in the little garden, on my mother’s furniture. It seemed flimsy now, all her attempts. There was a ceramic rabbit sitting at the edge of the rose bed, a smaller one just next to it. A reclining concrete cat curled on the table with the umbrella. None of it was hers really. She bought these little ornaments, but she didn’t own anything. Not the land.

I kept thinking of calling a taxi, but I didn’t want to go inside. My hands lay fallow and useless the way they always did here. Here with her, I was a bomb, always ticking and waiting. I told myself a taxi from where she lived in Beverly Hills to the airport would cost a hundred dollars or even more. We both used money that way, always as the excuse to be stuck together. We couldn’t admit any love.

The next day she packed her suitcase with all hard steps and jabbing elbows. She got up to do this at five o’clock.

“Come on, get up, I’ve got things to do.” She shook my shoulder.

“I don’t, so let me sleep.”

“Hunh-ah, come on, get going. I want to straighten up here before I leave.” There was metal in her voice.

So I sat there and watched her and listened to her for four hours.

Then oddly, at the end, in a strange voice, she said she would take me to the airport. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Well,” she said with a high laugh, “to tell the truth, I don’t really want you to stay here, tonight when I’m not here.”

“Why?”

“Well, I know you. You’ll take things. I never say anything, but I notice after you go, certain things are missing. I know you have my father’s ring and other little things. Choice things that are mine.”

“You don’t trust me to stay in your house?”

“No, I really don’t,” she said.

That was just part of the long movement. Of course she didn’t drive me to the airport. I waited at the hospital. One of her friends, Audrey, a woman who had once been a starlet and still received fan mail from the third world, came to visit my mother in pigtails and a pink gingham blouse all kindness and child-voiced concern. I left them and wandered to the hospital cafeteria. Outside were bushes with flat waxy green leaves. Everything in LA seemed almost still.

The next day she was like something hard cracked open so all the sweetness came out. She was soft and quiet and older and grateful. She begged me to stay longer. She thanked me for coming. To all of it I said no.

I slouched in the space between her bed and the table, talking on the phone to New York. I was telling Emily she had to meet me for dinner the night I got back.

My mother tried one more thing. She said she felt too weak to take me to the airport, but she could in the morning, once she got back her strength. I said no and that time I did start dialing a taxi. She got dressed then and drove me.

I had taken something from her apartment. It was a pin like a bobby pin with an enamel picture of a dog’s head on it. I’d found it in a little dish with buttons and pennies.

“Well, honey, I was scared. It’s very frightening. You know your hormones get funny. You’re not as much a woman anymore.”

She taught me, during our years alone, to forgive her absolutely anything.

When I got back, I took out my textbooks. I wanted to get down to business. I’d brought them along, but I hadn’t opened them. Every time I meant to and didn’t.

My mother once told me something, I could still repeat the grim dreamy smile, an I’ll-get-you smile, of complete power and its satisfaction, the smile a parent has banding back the pleasure his face can barely contain when he says to his child, “Take your pants down and go to your room,” before a spanking. But I was a girl. You cannot mark a girl’s soul just through her body. Girls’ bodies are used so much anyway. Girls, more than boys, learn to unhinge the two.

The thing my mother said to me that lasted was “You’re an over-achiever. You’re not really that smart. I am, but you’re not as high. My IQ is much better than yours, yours is just a little over average, really. You do well because you work hard.”

I believed her that day and nothing exactly changed. She watched, waiting. I willed myself absolutely still but what had been natural I now forced from memory. This foot before that foot was walking. I kept myself the same. I didn’t cry. Her eyes searched, her lips nervous with hunger. I don’t think I gave her anything. I cannot be sure. Her message, though, left me still on the outside, but fell deep and stayed. I learned that I would always have to work harder. This came to feel like something I could accept.

I liked school and I began to find interest in it, to get something from it for myself. I ended up a college student who needed vast hours to draw plans on paper. I drew buildings and cities, highway
ramps, roads around mountains. I drew while I tinkered in the lab, waiting for results. My mind spread and serened with the ticking of that soft pencil on paper the way another person’s might among the constant wood sound of prayer beads.

I was behind now, though, with my books. I settled down and made coffee and just decided I was up for the night. Sounds filtered down through the ceiling from the man upstairs, his TV.

I’d never used my own good habits to find my father. He was something else altogether. He was not school. He lived in a universe away from my cup of strong coffee and list of things to do. I never believed he was a regular man.

I had a matchbox, painted, full with faint papery violets, picked perfect, wild in the back fields when I was eight years old. I had used hours that way, picking the frail stems one by one. I had fasts written down, a line for each day on the cardboard insides of school notebooks. But superstition, deep as it ran, hadn’t gotten me any closer to him. And time was falling, falling. My father now would have been almost sixty.

I determined to try. I’d bought a black notebook, the kind students used as sketchpads. I liked that. I think every doctor or lawyer would kind of like to be an architect or an art student with a new clean sketchpad, beginning. I wrote down Venise King’s name. The Salvation Army. See a therapist. My mother had always told me I had two uncles in the United Nations. They never contacted me, never sent a card. I was always promised things like that—a rich family somewhere else, royalty, uncles in the UN—as if any of these people could have helped us, where we were, in Wisconsin. Once from California we wrote them a letter asking for money. I hardly believed they existed.