The highlight of my day was when I heard the echo of a ball bouncing off the asphalt and the sound of little claws skittering. I looked outside my window and there was a guy playing fetch with his dog, on the dead end street outside my window. He was a golden retriever, his fur glowing warm and buttery in the fading sunlight, a spring day coaxing towards sunset. His muscles flexed through his fur and his nails clicked and scratched the asphalt as he ran. The dog was joy, living, everything, happiness, being. It made me remember and feel that way again, in that moment, that living moment, no mourning for the past or hopes for the future. Just alive, breathing, running, free.

I didn’t realize the last time you came to see me you were saying good-bye. I guess I should have known; the tides were pulling us away. Still when it occurred to me, I was stunned, treading water in the ocean, having found a cold current, the shiver caught me unaware, and goose bumps rose up on my wet skin. You are a sly, sharp, sliver of metal that has burred its way under my skin. You are metal and I am wood; I am softer than I seem. I’ve been feeling lost and tender, like a new wound after the adrenaline of injury has worn off. I have been restless and fearful, transitioning. I am more certain now that I am on the verge, the cusp, with the haunting, familiar voice of inspiration whispering sweet promises to me. I’m about to be sucked into the vortex of creativity, a place where I am found but lost, doing what I am meant to do but still searching for meaning. I wish it was enough but it is not everything.

For months I have been consumed and pulled away from you, inadvertently, from life, unintentionally, from everything, accidentally. It wasn’t personal but I forget to articulate these things. Everyday was filled with dread. I felt like I was moving through sludge. I was unproductive, endlessly frustrated and angry.

I have an early memory of falling off my father’s shoulders in the front yard while he was running. I remember the absence of all sound as I fell to the ground, landing on my back. I was lying in the grass, the dark green blades were long and cool, probably damp but the moisture hadn’t seeped into my clothing yet. I was looking up at the sky, the only way you should ever look at the sky, by marrying your back to the earth. We had been chasing my sister and I could hear my dad’s voice quiet, far off, asking if I was ok. My sister doubled back, I could feel her in my peripheral, although I didn’t turn to look.

I knew she was high on her own exhilaration being from chased, being the focus of attention. It was all she ever wanted, good or bad. She stood paralyzed equally by her dislike of attention being averted and her joy of harm coming to me. I was always mesmerized by those moments that followed an accident, when things slowed down and you swell with some internal awe at having not injured yourself.

…

I had been waiting for my father to come home to tell him about a problem I was having at school. I was having trouble with a teacher and it was the most important issue in my life at that moment. I sat down in the blue armchair next to the fireplace as he lowered himself to the slate hearth.

The shoelaces of his construction boots were untied and loosened, his white tube socks peeking out from behind the tongues. The sleeves of his white thermal shirt were pushed up revealing his large forearms. He never wore a jacket, just a thick plaid flannel shirt when he worked outside. His faded blue Levis were sometimes cuffed, he was only 5’8”. Already bald by twenty, he always wore a navy blue or black bandana on his head. The fine black hair he had left, he grew long, sometimes twisting it into a single long braid. His eyebrows formed pointed peaks, like the roofs of houses. I have the same eyebrows.  He had a perfectly straight nose that my aunt envied. I only ever saw pictures of him without facial hair. He always had a mustache, a goatee or a Fu Manchu.

Most people were immediately afraid of him. He was stocky and intimidating looking. Once when my father entered a craft store, an older woman working behind the counter became afraid and started retreating backwards. He called out, “I’m looking for some acrylic paint for my daughter. Do you have any yellow ochre?” The woman was relieved and inched forward from her hiding place to help him. My dad told me later, “I think she thought I was going to rob the place.”

In front of the fireplace, he sat still and listened patiently as I unfolded my story. I experienced every emotion fully as I retold it. Afterwards, he paused. I hoped that he would impart some adult wisdom on my childhood dilemma. He said, “If I wasn’t so busy feeling sorry for myself, I’d take time out and feel sorry for you too.”

…

Sue was roller-skating backwards with the instructor at the center of the rink. They were skate dancing really, one of the queer hybrids still breathing life well into the late eighties. It was the middle of the day and we were at the Skate Station, where everyone in middle school went for birthday parties or just to eat pizza, play video games and wear glow necklaces while skating under the black light. The walls were painted with a rainbow that wrapped around the entire perimeter. Watching Sue move around the rink, I could see the sexuality she exuded, it was what the instructor and probably my father saw in her.

Sue was what we like to call white trash. She wasn’t what I considered attractive; she had that tired I’m-still-hot-for-a-mom look. She didn’t wear make-up or style her hair or have great taste in clothes. She wore cut-off jean shorts with the pockets hanging out and no underwear. Her brown hair was cut short and she wore men’s prescription aviator glasses, the kind a cop would wear. She had a 2-year-old son named Michael, a sweet cherub-faced boy with blond curls who was always smiling. He resembled a baby Phillip Seymour Hoffman. She was a good roller-skater. Her ability to flirt, dance and not wear underpants would be skills I would never possess.

Sue was my father’s girlfriend when I was in the seventh grade. Despite her apparent leanings towards slutty, she had a nurturing, domestic streak that was sincere. Unlike any of the women my father had dated before, she actually tried to be a substitute mom to me. Even if it was a thinly veiled attempt to win my affection, I enjoyed the attention. She moved in with my father who lived in the basement. She cooked all the time, even making noodles from scratch for chicken noodle soup. I didn’t even realize that you could make noodles; I had little experience with food that didn’t come out of a box.

It was one of the first times I remember getting Christmas presents from my dad, well, Sue. They gave me a reversible imperial blue and ivory fleece Unicorn blanket. She even took me shopping; I enjoyed being spoiled for the first time in my life. Once she took me to play B.I.N.G.O. It was a depressing scene, the bingo hall was like a cafeteria serving greasy pizza and elderly obese people smoking. I would inhale the artificial green apple of the bingo daubers to try to mask the thick odor of the cigarette smoke while attending to my cards. I won $50 on my first visit, beginner’s luck.

On one occasion, Sue did my laundry. She turned a favorite red Esprit shirt of mine coral, and for that, I will never forgive her.

My father and Sue had a volatile relationship. The same things he liked about her, would also throw him into a jealous rage. She seemed to know how to push his buttons; he had a tendency towards violence. They dated during the height of my father’s alcoholism, an addiction that fueled his rage. They would argue; he would punch holes in the walls. Screaming matches ended in 911 calls for domestic violence.

…

Secrets

I’m telling secrets, but they are mine to tell.
We’ll start with one I know so well.

The sound of too many footsteps in the house,
the cops pacing and shifting their weight, causing the wood floor to creak.
I’m in my bedroom with the lights off, pretending to be asleep.
I’m in the seventh grade.
I’m crying and the cops are asking you “How do you think this makes your daughter feel?”
I’m worried for a moment they’ll come down the hall and ask.
[Silence]
No answer.

Instead I hear the sound of you being thrown or throwing somebody against the front door,
being pushed onto the concrete steps and into the yard.
The grass is slippery and wet with dew, the night is dark, and in the backyard the river waits.

Then the brutal sound of your body hitting metal,
pinned against the hood of a police car.
In our front yard, on a school night.
You yelling, “You’re going to have to shoot me.
You’re going to have to kill me.”

You are unable to put your arms behind your back, they have to link handcuffs together to accommodate you, there is something written about it in your record. Along with your DUI, DWI, assault, domestic violence, jaywalking and indecent exposure. Some of these came later; for me it all happened at once.

The next morning I had to go to school.
I pretend everything is normal; I want desperately to be normal.
I get called out of French class into the guidance counselor’s office.

Walking towards Ms. Lyon’s office, I was terrified that she knew, that the police had called the school.
I sat down in a chair, facing her at her desk, “So Chandalin, how is everything at home?”

“Fine. Why?”

“Oh we are just checking in with the girls, making sure everyone is okay.”

Turned out it was just routine inquiry. Girls had been wearing black, depressed and mentioning suicide. Frances was rumored to have sliced her wrist with a piece of loose-leaf paper, while another girl carried around a plastic knife from the cafeteria. While other people fought for attention, I mastered invisibility. I managed not to exist at all at home.

Sitting there in her office, I considered confiding in her.

I wondered if they sent a social worker to my house if they would award custody to my grandfather and my aunt or if they would put me in foster care. My grandfather traveled all the time and my aunt was a single mom, raising two younger children on her own. The thought of foster care made me keep my mouth shut. I knew enough to know that things could get worse.

…

My dad had come home drunk when and him and my aunt got into an argument. He set down a Pepsi can on the countertop, accidentally placing it on a walnut, spilling the soda all over the mail. My aunt started yelling at him, he picked up the walnut in question and asked, “This? This is what you’re upset about?” and chucked it as hard as he could, splitting it in two. The next day I found one half of the walnut resting in the oven’s cooking rack. My aunt walked into the kitchen, looked over my shoulder and noticing that the inside of the nut was in the shape of a heart said, “Ironic.”

…

We lived in the country where we never locked our doors, except when my sister and I were kids. She was two years older and in charge of the key, which on more than one occasion she forgot. We were locked out one time and she threatened to spray me with the garden hose. I dared her. The heavy weight of the water soaked into my brown plaid school uniform. I grew cold as we waited outside. A slight breeze blew and the fall sunlight faded until the familiar crunching sound of tires over gravel could be heard creeping up the driveway.

I don’t know why, but I was prone to daring people to do things that ended badly for me. Once I dared a boy on the bus to give back a playing card he had stolen from my friend’s deck. He was dangling it out the bus window and I stood up on the seat and said, “Give it back, if you have the guts to.” Apparently, he didn’t. The card disappeared somewhere along Route 5. I later remember asking my dad, “What does guts mean?”

This was later; this was different. I arrived home from school to find the police waiting there: someone had broken into our house.

The police were interviewing my dad and my aunt. They asked us to take an inventory of the house and let them know if anything was missing.

I walked into my room to investigate. I was a good detective. I had a small salt and flour mold I made of my handprint as a child. The hook had long since rusted, so I used it as a paperweight for my lunch money. I was missing $1.

I had just done laundry the day before and remember placing my favorite lavender bra in the empty laundry basket. It was gone. I walked down the hall and asked my aunt, “Are you missing any bras?” She went back to her room to check. She was missing two.

My dad was missing his baseball hat and an XL jean jacket.

This was curious.

A transvestite broke into our house and stole my bra. Silence of the Lambs had just come out and I couldn’t help conjuring the image of a man trying to squeeze into one of my tiny bras.  As a teenager, my breasts were shallow little parentheses, still struggling to fill out a training bra. The thought a man trying to stretch my bra over his enormous torso, especially the lavender one with a little bow, both haunts and humors me.

Two weeks later, I was home alone after school when I heard someone come into the house. I yelled, “Hello” as I peered down the hallway, just in time to see a shadow disappear out the front door.

We had to start locking our doors.

…

He was unemployed and unemployable. He lost his license for drunk driving and now he had to walk or hitchhike to the bar five miles from our house. He wrote angry letters to the Department of Motor Vehicles.  Pages scrawled out in his cryptic handwriting, enclosed in envelopes address to the Moron Vehicle Association. He would ride along whenever someone was going to the DMV and hand out complaint forms to people standing in line.

My cousin saw me in school and told me that her mother had given my dad a ride home last night. She said that he was going on and on about how proud he was of me. I was embarrassed. I knew he had been hitchhiking home from the bar and was most certainly drunk. I suppose I didn’t feel sorry for him, he was too busy feeling sorry for himself.

…

I started to feel unsafe at home; a place where I thought my father could protect me. Curious the things that once made you feel safe later become the things you need protecting from. Just before I started high school, Sue moved to Florida and my father followed her, without me. He said that he was going to get set up, get a job, an apartment and send for me later. I remember being so afraid that everything was going to change, that everything was going to be different after he was gone. He was, after all, my only parent, my guardian. The one who would never leave me, left. Nothing changed. I went to school, came home, ate dinner, did my homework and watched television. Nothing changed. There was no difference. No ripple, no murmur, no twinge. How could that be, that my life wasn’t affected at all by his absence? No loss, just wonder and awe at having survived without injury, to exist in his absence.

She had decided to clean the van with Windex or Fantastic or Formula 409. Whatever it was it was not conducive to the heat of the drying sun and the qualities of automotive paint. He had left the job to her and she was just a child, his only child but then again he was a child too. He had been playing adult since he was twelve and I think he forgot that he was acting until one day it just became a believable role he would inhabit. The van was a Chevy and it was metallic blue with blue and grey racing stripes that bent in a sharp, pointed angle, in the spirit of a lightening bolt, over the hulking sliding side door. It had red shag carpeting that used to be in her bedroom, she ran her hands over its stubborn pile, its coarse mangy tufts spit out bits of dirt, sand, gravel. Still armed with paper towels, she wiped down the dashboard and bulging console, the drawer of which sometimes held a clipboard. Two captain’s seats, the passenger seat shared by her and her sister who would squeeze in hip to hip, both strapped under one seatbelt.

He was often a lone captain lumbering around in the grumbling ship. The steering wheel caused a terrible noise when turned; the van lurched forward out of stubbornness on its dusty worn tires. He would drive it into the backyard, navigating the shallow part of the hill, turning sharply as it dipped towards the riverbank. One evening in winter, the hillside was covered in ice. As he drove up the hill, his tires lost traction, causing him to drift backwards towards the steep riverbank. The hill was well worn, like the slippery sole of a shoe, now covered in ice. What awaited him was a riverbank lined with stones made from broken concrete, and below that the river. The fall would be drastic and sudden. The tires are spinning on the ice, the van rolling backwards, but he refused to abandon ship. The van paused momentarily on a small Cedar tree that had taken root on the bank’s edge. It was long enough for him switch gears and turn his tires and find traction, climbing back up the hill, crawling cautiously away from death’s indifferent shoulder.

That same year, his wife wanted him to cut down that small Cedar tree for a Christmas tree. He told her that Cedar tree had saved his life and he promised that he would never cut it down. He meant to dig it up, roots and all, to replant it away from the riverbank. The view of the river was supposed to be unobstructed, it was the family rule; nothing was ever allowed to grow there. Like many things it had been forgotten, time passed until it was too late to take action. It was allowed to grow on the riverbank, enormous now in all its years, robust and full around the middle like a Santa Claus, blocking a good bit of the peripheral view of the river, obscuring an entire pier from some angles. The wife is gone. The child is gone. He is still there and the tree is too.

We lived near Point Lookout, the most haunted lighthouse in America. It was a peninsula with large boulder like rocks scattered along the shore and the site of a prisoner camp during the Civil War where soldiers froze to death in the winter.

Nearby, on our Uncle’s sun-bleached pier, wood planks bowed collecting puddles of rainwater. The hard edges curled up like a spoon, pressing into the soft skin of barefoot arches. Saltwater softening scabs, turning them mucus green.

By mid-June the water temperature would warm and there would be jellyfish. The tides would wash batches of jellyfish onto the sand, stranding them to dry out in the sun. My sister and I would pierce a stick through the center of their bodies. The feeling of thick flesh resisting traveled up the spine of the stick, its tough muscle pushing you into regret. We would toss the twig aside, rescue the rest of the jellyfish, scooping them up in our hands, sand and all, and returning them to the sea. Slowly they would resurrect, pumping their hearts, reunited with the sea.

We were borrowing our Uncle’s green canoe, pushing out into the river behind our house to Tippity Witch Island. Our Dad wouldn’t let my sister or I help, he rowed the entire way with the blood orange oar. It was always like that with us: him on one side, us on the other. Sharing a seat on one side of a canoe or paired together under the seatbelt of the passenger seat of his blue Chevy van.

…

My sister and I filed into the room and pressed our backs to the wall. We stood that way, like two wet paper towels thrown against and now plastered to the wall. Our Dad maneuvered around the maze of the convertible sofa until he found an opening. Kristine and I watched as he kissed Ann as her two daughters climbed up the couch cushions to greet him. He picked them up and tossed them around playfully and they laughed and giggled in pure joy from his attention. He was our Dad but we could barely recall a time when he was so warm and affectionate with us. We had surrendered to our fate, being the well-behaved, fearful children of a man with a quick temper whom mostly barked orders at us.

Seeing him shower those girls with attention, our attention, it became clear. He was capable of showing love and being affectionate, he just chose not to, with us. That is when the cruelty set in. The realization in that moment, having to internalize that at ten years old, lining our insides with the unlovable upholstery that would insulate us always and forever.

He gave them presents. He forgot to fill our Christmas stockings. Once my for my birthday, he gave me a card designed to hold money. Tucked inside was an I.O.U. note. I kept a locked cash box in my nightstand drawer. As my father’s drinking progressed, money began to disappear. Three hundred dollars of birthday money from relatives and the allowance I earned from my grandfather had been replaced by I.O.U. notes scrawled in my Dad’s handwriting.

…

My father drank at a bar called the Green Door, about five miles north of our house. His best friend Brian Tarelton owned it. As kids we used to hang out there when my father was hired to do some work on the place. In the dark bar on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the old drunks gave us quarters to play video games. While he worked, we’d try to play pool and climb up on the barstools and drink cokes through red cocktail straws. There’s a distinct smell that a bar has: wood encrusted with cigarette ash and saturated with spilled beer. When I walk by a bar with an open door and the smell drifts out, I recall the feeling of being inside that dark room with the small rectangle of blinding daylight framed by the open door.

I still remember the phone number to the Green Door. Whenever I came home from school and needed to reach him, to sign a field trip permission slip or report card, I would have to call him there. When I left for school he was sleeping, when I came home he was at the bar. He would usually come home after I went to bed. I would leave paperwork for him to sign on the kitchen counter by the telephone.

Sometimes I’d hear him come in, he had a loud smoker’s cough. I would listen to him in the kitchen, clanging pots and pans as he heated up leftovers on the stove. Sometimes he’d leave something on the stove that would burn and smoke up the house. I’d listen, as he’d walk down the stairs, often slipping and missing a few steps on the way down to the basement.

…

My father had been rowing for hours. The sun was beating down on him, he had taken off his shirt and was beginning to turn lobster red. The oars spun little whirlpools on the surface of the water and the small current continually rocked the canoe. It seemed that we were going nowhere, we were in the middle of the river, our house shrinking in the distance but still some distance from the island.

…

The canary yellow phone in the kitchen had a matching coiled cord that I wrapped around my index finger as I stretched it into the dining room where I could sit and talk in one of the chairs. My father smoked Newport cigarettes and put them out in plants in the room divider when he was on the phone. My aunt would rest the phone in the crook of her shoulder while she prepared dinner, or did the dishes. I would sometimes call my mom on that phone.

When I was climbing up the shelves in the linen closet stacked with folded terrycloth towels, I discovered a wicker basket full of photographs and postcards from my mom. They were sent from Rhode Island, where she had moved after leaving my Dad around the time I was a year old. They were glossy photos of fall trees pressed onto cardstock, her cursive handwriting on the back but I don’t remember the words. Just a mother writing to children that couldn’t yet read and would never understand.

She said that if we wanted to keep in touch that we could call her collect and she would call us back. She also said that if we wrote to her, she would write us back. Looking back it seems strange that it was our responsibility as children to initiate and maintain contact while she would only reciprocate.

On our first visit to see our mom, I was six, my sister 8. We couldn’t remember what she looked like and we were afraid that we would hurt her feelings if we didn’t recognize her. In the few photographs we had seen, she reminded me of Samantha from Bewitched or Lindsay Wagner, The Bionic Woman. We waited in the mirrored lobby with my Dad standing several paces behind us. I heard her high heels on the floor and saw her legs, her skirt and her blond hair, arms outstretched, ready embrace us as she walked towards us. She recognized us.

…

The year I thought my father was going to marry Ann things began to change. I was in the fifth grade when my sister moved away. She didn’t really belong to us anyway, my half-sister, my mother’s daughter from a previous marriage. Her father remarried a woman named Darlene who had two children of her own and didn’t like Kristine. She had moved away to live with her grandmother in Ohio.

We usually went to visit our mom together but on this trip I went alone. My mother lived in a high-rise apartment building in a two-bedroom apartment she shared with her boyfriend Lou who worked for the building doing maintenance.  Her living room had white carpeting and silver furniture from the lobby.

I was worried that my Dad was going to marry Ann. I was afraid of what that change meant. I didn’t have any memory of my parents ever being together and I didn’t have any reason to believe they would ever reconcile. Still I didn’t want my parents to get divorced and I didn’t want things to change. My father was all that I had left and I didn’t want to share him.

In my mother’s living room, I looked up at her and I began to reveal my fear, “I don’t want my Dad to marry Ann. Can I come live with you?”

She said, “No.”

My mother has always been a mystery to me, a woman with a black velvet heart. I remember her becoming uncomfortable and fidgety when I began to cry, that she couldn’t tolerate it. Wounded by her rejection and her inability to console me, I crawled underneath the bench in the living room, pressed my cheek against the carpet and continued to cry. She became so annoyed with my behavior that she left the room. I watched as her legs walked away from me, the carpet itchy against my cheek. She couldn’t even be my mother for five minutes.

…

My father did not marry Ann. My fears about him getting remarried never resurfaced although he continued to date.

…

When I was in the middle school my sister stopped talking to our mother. I would go and visit her alone. She was still together with Lou; they were both alcoholics, her vodka, him Jack Daniels. They both smoked pot and he also did coke.

Lou was a piece of shit. He was tall and wiry, with thick black hair like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He has a tattoo of his name on his arm, it is only 3 letters long, but the tattoo is crooked. It looks like a prison tattoo, each letter lower than the one before it, slanting downwards, as if the person writing it was falling asleep. He drove a Pinto. The gas tank was located the rear and when they were hit from behind, they had a tendency to catch fire.

My mother was preparing to host a dinner party at the apartment. We were peering into the refrigerator to check on the cucumber rosettes that we had left soaking in a bowl of ice water. Lou was dressed up and already drunk by the afternoon. He came into the kitchen and tried to stop the blade of a small black fan by sticking his finger in it. His finger was cut badly and blood went everywhere. He just stood there laughing while my mother rushed to clean up the blood before the guests arrived.

Lou often went out drinking, he was a social drinker, like my father. He came back to the apartment one night drunk, I was woken up to the sound of him and my mother arguing in their bedroom. He wanted to have sex with her and she wasn’t in the mood. I could hear him say through the wall “What if I go and wake up your daughter and show her what a fat, pathetic cunt her mother is?” My mother was crying, begging him not to. I heard the door slam and him come down the hallway for me. I pretended I was sleeping, my back facing him as he opened my bedroom door and cast an arc of light over the darkened room. He hovered at the doorway, my eyes staring into the darkness, my body curled in into a motionless ball. He closed the door and walked back out again.

…

We had packed bologna sandwiches in paper bags and passed two to my father while my sister and I both ate a half. The Wonder Bread stuck to the roof of our mouths in little crescent shaped bites. My father was tired from rowing but he never spoke of it. We were close enough now to make out the individual trees and the tall reeds at the shoreline. It was bigger than I had imagined.

We would never arrive at the island. After hours of rowing we would simply turn around and go home.

I was twenty-nine and in Berlin for Christmas. I called my father in Maryland on Christmas day. For some reason, his number was blocked from receiving international calls. So I tried the number for upstairs, where my aunt Jeannie lives with her two children. It just rang and rang and rang. Finally my Dad answered the phone. “Why is your line blocked from receiving international calls?” I asked when he finally picked the receiver, “Who’s calling you internationally?”

“It’s all those mail-order Russian brides,” he answered.

“Why didn’t anyone answer upstairs, isn’t anyone home?”

“Oh they’re probably all in their rooms. We went shopping at the mall and ended up getting into a fight. They decided to cancel Christmas. When are you coming home?”

“Never. I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

My Dad just laughed. After I got off the phone, I wrote him a postcard. I told him to apply for his passport and that next year we’d spend Christmas together in another country.

When my father turned 50 and I was 30, we spent Christmas in Paris. It was the first time my father traveled outside the United States. He had often talked about wanting to travel but had never done it. When he turned twenty I was born and my half-sister, just two years older than me, my mother’s child from another marriage had come to live with us. Then my mother left when I was a year old, leaving my father with the responsibility of two young daughters. Looking back I realized the reason my father could never travel was because of us and now I realized that I could be the reason that he could.

On the plane my father asked me where the closest bathroom was, even though I hadn’t been to the bathroom yet and was sitting in the window seat, “I don’t know, look to the right or left or ask a stewardess.”

“Well I thought you would know, you’ve traveled a lot more than me, I thought you‘d know the layout of the plane.”

“I haven’t been on this plane or this airline before, how would I know that?” Christ.

The first time my father had ever flown on a plane was the first time I flew. We took a two-hour flight to Florida to go to Disney World when I was in middle school. I had long since been over such things but my father seemed to be unaware of the strange adultness teenage girls possess. It rained everyday and my father seemed exhausted, the entire weekend a failed attempt to give back the childhood he had taken from me. Often too little, too late was never enough.

In Paris, my plan was to have a really busy itinerary, to basically tucker him out like a toddler. We went to Versailles, where I took a picture of him being attacked by a seagull. It swooped down towards his head; he said birds always attack him. We went to the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais; the Petit Palais was his favorite. On Christmas Eve we went to midnight mass at Notre Dame. We climbed to the top of the Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de’ Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. In the evenings we would write postcards.

By the second night we had already gotten into a terrible fight. It started when my father asked me to make him a sandwich. I told him that he was a grown man and he could make his own sandwich and “this is not the 1950’s.” I do not remember my father ever making a sandwich for me. It felt like an insult to injury that this man who never took care of me wanted me to take care of him. I refuse to enable him like his sisters or his mother.

He said he didn’t like my attitude and my sarcasm. I told him that he was behaving like a needy man-baby and that I wasn’t going to take care of him. He said, “You just don’t seem happy. “

“Thanks for the news flash!” I yelled back.

We were staying across from the Gare de Lyon, a train station that has many street exits. I couldn’t convince my father to get a Paris phone chip for his cell phone and I was concerned that if we ever got separated he would get lost. He has always had really bad short-term memory, never able to remember what he ate the night before, etc. I had been trying to get him to remember our address and the correct exit to take from the train station so that he could always find his way back to the apartment. After teaching him this for about a week, I asked him “so what exit do we take?” and he thought about it and couldn’t recall. Exhausted, exasperated I said “Everyday is new for you!”

There was a pharmacy on the corner of our street that my father liked to visit because he is a hypochondriac and they spoke English and he was lonely for conversation. We would stop by every night and he would ask them some questions and buy some medication. At some point I mentioned that they probably think he is a hypochondriac and that put a stop to his daily visits. My father got pink eye in Paris. He told me that an old woman with swollen red eyes stared at him on the train and that’s how he got infected. I tried to explain to him that you could not catch pink eye from someone looking at you. Back to the pharmacy we went.

My father had recently become diabetic, as a result of being hospitalized for three months with Pancreatitis. He had both his gall bladder and pancreas removed. His body is no longer able to create insulin and he has to take digestive enzymes when he eats because his body cannot breakdown fat. I reminded him several times to pack all his medications, along with any special diet stuff for the trip.

“I just can’t believe they don’t have iced tea.” My father would order a hot tea and explain to every waiter how he wanted a glass of ice, a side of lemon and a sugar substitute so that he could fabricate his own iced tea.  I tried to get my Dad to make iced tea at the apartment that we could bring with us during the day. On the subject of sugar substitutes, “I can’t believe they don’t have Splenda.” No wonder people hate Americans.

Every morning my father would complain about the clock on the mantle. He said it was too loud and he would lie in bed awake at night, listening to it ticking. I teased him with, “The Tell-Tale Heart?” One morning I found the clock hidden between some towels in the bathroom cabinet.

After a particularly exhausting day my Dad said “Good night” in a singsong tone, like a child that has misbehaved does just to stick it to you. Completely deadpan, I answered “Rest in peace.” My Dad just laughed.

We went ice-skating at the Eiffel Tower. During the winter they have a small skating rink on the second tier. As children we always wanted to go ice-skating but the rivers and ponds by our house never froze during winter. My father fell through the ice once as a child when he was ice-skating alone. He managed to pull himself out of the freezing water. His sister Jan recalled laughing at him when he turned up at the house soaking wet.

My father is a husky, stocky man, with a Fu Manchu. He appears to most a hybrid of redneck, pirate and construction worker. Matching faded jean jacket and relaxed fit Levis and construction boots is his usual attire. On the ice, he is graceful, like Baryshnikov. He can even skate backwards. I stumble and struggle, having only ever skated once at Rockefeller Center when I was in college. I stood there, maybe taking photos or shooting video of my father, just watching him glide across the ice effortlessly. This man who made his daughters walk single file behind him on the sidewalk, this violent man that had blackouts and bar fights. Who once incredible-hulked, throwing a television set into our backyard because I didn’t answer the phone.  He was at one with the ice. Seeing my father in harmony with something, with nature, with life was something I had never experienced.

My father is a physical man; he has made a lifetime of defining himself through his strength and abilities. As a teenager he hauled vending machines for the family business. I his early twenties he worked high-rise construction in Virginia. In his fifties, he still works doing physical labor everyday.

Now my father is afraid to go places alone. He never liked being far from home but he didn’t use to be like this.  He needs someone to ride with him in the car to doctor’s appointments, to the store, to run errands. He said he could go anywhere as long as someone he knows is with him. He doesn’t seem to understand the toll that takes on the other person.

His sister Jan booked a plane ticket to join us in Paris; I think just to take care of him. She gets after me, saying that I am mean to my father and that he “has a disease,” referring to his alcoholism. It makes me sick that she still makes excuses for him but never stood up for my sister or me when we were only children. Lying next to her in bed, I stare up at the ceiling and say, “He’s just so needy.”

Jan says, “All men are needy.”

My friend Bethany is renting a room in the Hamptons while she works there for the summer as a massage therapist. She lives on the property with the owner and two other tenants. When Bethany was leaving for work in the morning the owner came out and said, “They are killing Russell Crowe!”
Bethany yelled out “Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!”
Russell Crowe is the name of the rooster who woke up the tenants by crowing at 3:30 that morning.

Often the inconceivable comes true. An unlikely scenario plays out, an uncontrollable fate unfolds, a puzzled victim recovers, analyzing and repeating the incident, living in the past suspended in the present, a thick fluid congealing around every attempt to struggle, to break free, to resume one’s life. The limbs on rusty little hinges, every movement reminding you of limitation, every bone in its socket creaking and lumbering into place finding its nook among settled and worn pockets. Spiky bones of rotting fish, brittle nails grown long but weak, twisted bed sheets and hard dry crumbs on countertops, this is the caulk between shower doors, precariously sheltering wet from damp. Proceeding grave is gallows. Then tomb, catacomb, sea or ash:  a lengthy withdrawal into eminent domain.

The scissors scratch through the itchy twine, unraveling edges. The dog’s saliva softening bone; carving toothy grooves. Calling back into focus the wrongs you have committed, the people you inadvertently hurt by not loving, the ones you left without remorse; the distance you maintain. In silence you suffer the wish you left hidden, in the world you witness the life you weren’t given. You attempted to love but were held by the truth of all you had witnessed.  The memory of scrap yards with hollow shells of automobiles, surrounded by tall weeds and stunted grass. Sun-bleached logos on crushed aluminum cans; abandoned filters of cigarettes.

Your past is a disposable diaper still waiting to decompose. Nothing organic remains. Illuminated with the buzz and hum of a fluorescent bulb, smolder creeping in from the ends, blackening its resolve. Walking, shuffling feet, casting shadows underneath doorways, the weight of fear pulling like gravity, your spine to the bed. Paralyzed, you wait for the many tiny sutures to dissolve. The scar can be traced with a finger too calloused for nuance, toughened by persistent injury. Prickled by the needlepoint, burned by the impatience. Knuckles bleed from daily fumbling with indifference, your voice a hoarse whisper reminding you not to fail. Spine compressed, your neck misaligned, pride takes its toll pushing the cartilage, tugging the monofilament.

Barefoot on rotting tree stumps, cobwebs clinging to splinters, bugs parading in disintegrating bowels; shadow at my back, sun blinding me. The future is hard to walk towards with hope, the present being defined by successive moments of hesitation. Sometimes I venture to walk sideways, scuttling like a crab, hitting my hipbones on jutting corners and corridors too narrow to navigate. I feel like the woman who kept adding rooms to her house for fear if she stopped building she would die. The inevitable comes no matter what we do to ward off its threat. No tincture or spell to undo the undoing.

Better to be out in the world than at home alone with my thoughts. My undoing has always been my thoughts maybe also my feelings and my struggle to control things outside of myself. The tricky way I refine thoughts, smooth their edges, shaping them into an hourglass, waiting for time to dilute them, expel them, staining my hands. The thoughts that trigger the feelings, the feelings that are valid but irrational and then the explanation that tries to rationalize the feelings. It is all a tricky dialogue between self idealized and self-actualized. The person I want to be is unencumbered by insecurity and does not interpret the actions of others as personal and internalize them as an inward struggle.

Protecting yourself, building your armor, a black insect shell.
Tightening the abdomen, twisting the nettles, like a cyst with teeth and hair, the uncomfortable feeling grows. Outside the world is indifferent. Inside the walls of the apartment seem plaintive. Chalk drawn on asphalt, erased with a palm. You wander into yourself, cyclonic. The vortex is death; the resistance is life.

Being ignored, abandoned or simple not being wanted conjures thoughts of vast deficiency. This is an old wound. The unlovable, the old record the familiar tune.

Under the stairs, the cellar, the attic. Call to me now from force of habit. The smell of black dye in fabric, a promise you made now rescinded: Keep in touch. You crawled like a wounded animal to its death, never to be heard from again.

My rabbit died.

Two shoes abandoned, sucking me into the whirlpool, the spinning water in the toilet flushed…my rabbit was not behind the bathtub, was not next to the paper maché igloo, I looked for her under the stairs. In the third place, she was stiff on her side behind the wheel of my bike. I didn’t want her to die alone. I failed her. Maybe it was the heat, maybe she stroked out like the elderly, warned to take care on hot days. I wonder if she was thirsty. I don’t think she struggled. Did she just give up, waiting for me to come home?

After work I took a look at the sky, a storm was brooding, the wind was racing. The sky worn blue silver denim, the color of old blue eyes…I felt like something bad was going to happen, maybe a tornado. So I walked straight home, not going to the bank, not stopping at a store. I didn’t know she would be waiting for me, I didn’t know that was the terrible thing.

I didn’t know what to say; I was non-verbal.

She was stiff. I applied pressure to try and curl her gently into a smaller ball. Her body resisted. I tucked her into a 2 gallon Ziplock bag, smoothing her ears. I drew the excess air from the bag with my breath and pressed the seal closed. I repeated this until she was nested in 3 plastic bags. I placed her in the freezer, at first laying her sideways then not knowing what to do with the ice cube trays, I rotated her. She fit so neatly there, room to the right for 2 stacked ice trays. She was no bother in death, as in life.

Then it started to hit me, the feeling of loss.

I was washing her bed; I left it soaking in the tub, expecting that she would lie in it again. The litter box, the igloo, the water and the food bowls. The limp and rubbery carrots and dandelion greens left wilting. The hay and the branches: the fur and her droppings. I couldn’t look at it anymore, I could not have reminders of the once living now dead. Through tears I filled a garbage bag with her things. What if I wanted to smell something of hers again?

When I opened the freezer I thought her ears look flattened so I opened 1-2-3 plastic bags and tried to smooth them. I knelt and cried while stroking her soft ear between my thumb and my forefinger. I miss her; I miss her being alive.

Sometimes I forget she is gone; I look for her still.