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.

“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.”

I wrote “Happy Birthday Dad!
I know this is a Halloween card but let’s face it, at your age, birthdays are scary.”

Whenever it snows I think of the frozen cat.

When my Dad was a young boy he had a Siamese cat. Siamese cats are notorious criers and one night it climbed up the oak tree and got stranded. Upon hearing it crying, my Grandfather went outside to try and coax it down. It kept climbing higher and higher until there was no hope of reaching it.

That night a snowstorm blew in. The next morning the cat was gone.

My Dad went sledding in the morning before going to school. After school he went sledding again. This time his sled hit something in the snow. He dug into the snow and found the frozen Siamese cat. He must have run over it a dozen times.

He brought it into the kitchen where my Grandmother placed it in a small box next to the heat vent. She was hoping to thaw it out enough to be able to curl it into the box to bury it. She went back to cooking dinner. Later she heard a cat meowing. She turned around and noticed that the box was empty. Then my Dad walked into the kitchen with the unfrozen Siamese cat rubbing up against his legs and purring.

In 2004 I was 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 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 my Dad 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?” I asked.

“Oh they’re probably all in their rooms. We went shopping for Christmas presents and everyone ended up getting into a fight and they decided to cancel Christmas. When are you coming home?” he asked in the same breath.

“NEVER! I can’t believe you just asked me that after telling me that Christmas is canceled.”

My Dad just laughs.

After I got off the phone with my Dad 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. 

In 2005, 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.

I told my dad that I was working at a metal shop and he said “Call Pratt and tell them you want your money back.” Pratt is the art school I went to where I majored in painting.

I was grinding all day and not the good kind. Kim says, “I like it because it’s like going to the gym.” My response, “Who goes to the gym for nine and a half hours?”

I spent an entire day at a drill press imagining I was Bjork in Dancer in the Dark. Later, when I got home, I pulled five metal spurs out of the bottom of my foot. Apparently tucking you pants into your boots is an amateur mistake.

Kim calls the project manager B.D.A., Big Dumb Asshole.