Next of Kin, page 14
Wait! Let’s talk about it.
Did we allow ourselves to believe it could be understood and therefore eventually embraced? I remember thinking at one point that the whole trespass might be experienced as a kind of relief, a relief to know that that stubborn cast iron beam there at the clumsy back of their twenty-three-year marriage had finally been confronted. And if not, then I was at least consoled that I had cleverly spared my own boys any of that post-divorce dating unbearableness that might’ve loomed up ahead had I not chosen familiar, beloved “Uncle Michael,” and instead left them to encounter strangers traipsing through the kitchen in the mornings and rifling through the fridge hunting for eggs and toast. I was sure I had spared them at least that. But this queasy decision—to set the seesaw back in motion between two sisters with one man as the barrel hinge at the center—was too heavy, and under no circumstances, no matter the hierarchies or taxonomies, would it be experienced that way. I had spared no one, it had not been endured sturdily, and no literary figures were modeled and no part of it was turned into jokes.
There were no jokes to be made about it.
* * *
Decades earlier when this sordid story began, I shared with my father that I had just found out that my boyfriend and my sister had had a one-night stand, as they’d explained it, and my dad said, “Oh yeah, Gabs, that’s been going on for a while.” He had known, it turns out, that they were having an ongoing affair and had not told me. I felt like I’d been kneecapped; once by them but, secondly, by him especially, and I could not pack my passport fast enough. With family like this…I sportingly channeled a little Rodney Dangerfield humor, while racing to the airport.
But decades later, when the seesaw slammed down and I sent my own tender sister into the wilds of betrayal and stunned fury, our father at last intervened. He declared me dead to him. He didn’t say this to me directly but announced it there at his favorite after-work bar, sipping a Negroni. The bartender later passed it along to Michael, who passed it along to me. I called my dad when I heard and left him a message at his office. “Hi, Dad. I hear through the bartender grapevine that I am dead to you?” I said it with a question mark. And then I giggled a little, at the melodrama of it. It’s possible he never said it at all, that it was just an unsubstantiated rumor; given the clichéd wording I could see that as a possibility. But I was calling to confront him. To verify the data. To face my chores and shoulder my responsibilities. To show him the right way to disown me.
“Well. I’m sorry to have put you in that position or to have caused you to feel that way. Let me know, maybe, when you get a chance, in person. Better to hear it that way, I think, than through the bartender.” How many times, I start to wonder, have I had to telephone this man to teach him how to be? It’s outrageous, of course, to have behaved as I have and yet to feel entitled to find a moral failing in my father’s response. I somehow cannot relinquish this relentless insistence that someone in the room must remain reasonable, in charge, focused, principled, must keep a steady hand on the rudder. Someone, I feel, must captain the ship and take care of the crew, even when the winds are whipping up, and I have an incorrigible sense that it should be him. This is before I am aware that I am now the wind. That I am the one who troubleth his own house and who shall inherit the wind. He did not return my call.
* * *
The terrible scandal that I had authored settled eventually into a plain and rather gentle fact of life to be lived, and we lived it privately and contentedly for its duration, of a couple more very pleasant years. It had been scandalous. Then, matter-of-fact. But even so, the town and the family and our relationship to both were unrecoverable. None more so than with Jeffrey, who lost in the explosion not only his anchor and dear friend, Michael, whom he could most certainly not forgive, but all the parties and the lamb roasts and the graduations and the cash advances and the free dinners and the swimming pools and the woodsmoke and the only front yard left in any of our lives that had held the feeling of home. The last place on Earth that had still held all of us—the argumentative and the provocative and the rivalrous and the violent and the discerning alike—surrounded by fireflies, in her cool pleasant shade. We had blown it to smithereens, as we would admit grimly, shaking our heads incredulously, as if we ourselves were shell-shocked bystanders and not the agents of the shelling.
* * *
When Jeff died, my father was the one who mustered, in spite of everything, and left the voice message on my telephone. Hello, New York. Dad here. Last night Jeffrey hung himself—“hanged” himself, I guess is how it’s said. Anyway.
That’s over, he sighs. His voice is matter-of-fact, resigned. As if some inevitability has finally arrived. I thought you should know, he says, and hangs up.
In the course of thirty years of cutting off my mother, the general feedback is that there is something unreasonably angry and unforgiving about me. And until Jeffrey killed himself, and I heard my father say, “Well, that’s over,” in that shrugging tone of his, as if some humdrum old fate had finally come to its inevitable eventuality, I had never believed otherwise. I accepted myself as harsh. Strident. Demanding. I knew I was exceedingly difficult to love. Even harder, perhaps, to like. All of us, all of the siblings, have been described at times by those who know us as “prickly.” I had always understood the question of familial rifts and estrangement to be about parents who cannot suffer one more minute of their insufferable children but who feel wounded and unduly punished when their children—who have picked up on this—remove themselves from the unbearable position in which they find themselves. Who leaves and who is left has been an enduring confusion for me for decades. “I hurt,” I once heard a famous writer in an interview say, “which has two opposite meanings.”
But hearing that phrase and that tone—“Well, that’s over”—was the first time one of his doozies hit me as neither scintillating nor charmingly contrarian. It woke me, suddenly, like a middle-of-the-night click of a latch on a downstairs window.
The casual diagnosis we prized: unique, with the symptoms we favored—individualistic, complicated, straight-shooting; if you weren’t complex, endowed with dark humor, unflinching candor, a robust constitution, and charming quirky eccentricity, you were then simple, small, mundane. A clerk.
But suddenly, retrospectively, we seemed obscene, tawdry, ugly, even dangerous. It started to seem to me that there might be something more egregious at play than bushy eyebrows and crowded teeth. Family drama and contentiousness and scandal seemed manageably colorful to me up until then—nothing straight and narrow here to scoff at—and, in some way, lent a veneer of intellectual or artistic bona fides to us; in the most enduring literature, and in the most regarded publications, writers insist on such complexity as if it were the Platonic ideal.
You know there is no such thing as a Norman Rockwell family, and you know equally well that it would reveal something cloying and facile about yourself—that you lack backbone and intellectual integrity—to admit to nonetheless longing for one. Since you were old enough to sit up at the table and use a fork and knife, you’ve read the faces and clocked the disappointed reactions when someone’s plus-one at the dinner party, who won’t soon be invited back, has blithely
recounted a long dream,
wept sentimental sentiment,
told a happy-ending story about their childhood,
gushed immoderately about their own ordinary and unexceptional children,
expressed an earnest sense of hope,
wept, without apologizing.
I have all along studied the mistakes, the markers of having flubbed, whiffed, and screwed the pooch on intellectual and artistic rigor. And I have tossed around in my mind the Platonic, the Aristotelian, and the more flexible Wildean ideas of Life imitating Art and Art imitating Life. Have scrambled them all together at times, and perhaps foolishly also made room for the merits of the barstool wit and the dinner party raconteur. But sudden death, suicide, irrevocable family destruction, loss, and demise struck me as black and severe. This is not Art. Nor Anecdote. This is Life. Something to sit up straight and salvage what’s left of.
In particular, my own life. The way I’d been rigging it, provoking it, pushing at the seams of it to see if it would bear my weight and announce my complexities. Divorced, rancorous, estranged from my family, with a preteen son who has already had detention and been suspended for bullying, who has howled his wish to emancipate by the time he’s in sixth grade; my transgression, an affair with my own sister’s husband, quickly and garishly picked up by Page 6, all of which had been admittedly problematic yet categorically permissible to me up until then as “a little messy” or “human” or merely “alternative.” Show me one person who doesn’t have some complicated relationships, I would’ve thrown down as a dismissive gauntlet back then—until my dad said about Jeffrey, hanging there dead, “Well, that’s over.”
I find myself listening to that voice message—as both a Hamilton parent and a Hamilton child—in sober alarm: Am I perpetrator and casualty in the very same body? I worry. I can no longer find anything funny or charming about who I’ve been or who I might be if, sitting here bolt upright in the dark, I don’t throw back the covers, grab the bat, and go downstairs to confront the intruder. Who may very well already be deep inside the house.
I am invited to the wedding of a cherished employee of mine around this time. I have been this guy’s employer since he was a twenty-year-old kid, and over the years have welcomed his young friends and his roommates to family meals and to festive Easter bonnet parties and to stray-dog Thanksgivings at my restaurant, and now he is in his thirties, getting married. I meet the father of one of his friends—a hard-hustling, witty, self-deprecating fireball of a kid who is growing up to be an outstanding gentleman—and I gush to the father about his wonderful, polite, well-bred, hardworking son, and the father takes my hand, thanks me, and, smiling with a real sparkle in his eye, says, “Well, the fruit describes the tree!”
Mistakes Were Made
Every spring of every year of my father’s life—married, divorced, remarried, separated; at our childhood home, at the bachelor rentals, at his shore house, at his studio; on his deck, on his lawn, in raised beds, in tilled earth; one foot cut off at the ankle, then the leg cut off at the knee; one valve in his heart opened with a stent, then all four valves stented, and then again, yet another stent, this one placed in his groin; no matter: Every spring my father plants a garden. He starts the season with scallions, radishes, and snap peas and ends it with tomatoes and beans and Swiss chard. He is forever arriving at someone’s house for dinner and, instead of flowers or a bottle of wine, presenting an artful but unadorned bouquet from his garden. Even if I haven’t seen the man in years, no matter how long I’ve now been dead to him, in spite of the fact that he is now possibly months away from his own death, I can picture exactly where he is on those warm sunny mornings as he thins his radishes and stakes his tomato plants.
One day, I arrive home late in the afternoon and find a slim box on the front stoop. Inside is a bouquet of green onions, radishes, lettuces, chives, and slender pale carrots; they arrive rolled up inside wet newspaper, perspiring inside a plastic baggie that has been delivered to the front door of my apartment all the way from his home in rural New Jersey. With no note and no return address. None needed; I recognize the gesture instantly. Come on, he seems to be saying. Here is a wet newspaper cone of this year’s first scallions and radishes from my garden. Stop being dead to me.
I feel moved—a little—by this gesture, this subtle bid for a truce. It occurs to me for the first time that what he loved about our favorite movie is probably not what I loved about it: the stick-shift driving, cigarette smoking rascal daughter. And that more likely what he loved was the widow-swindling, grifter father who was never forced to say anything tender and who could disappear for years but still show up late and be loved by her. He is, and always has been, charming. But I don’t reach out.
Instead, at work the following day I start running an item on the new spring menu: a pinzimonio—a small, neatly formed cone of wet newspaper stuffed with the season’s earliest first crops from the farmers market, a few radishes and baby white turnips and a few scallions, sweet peas, and leaf lettuces—and serve it with a dish of first-press olive oil from Italy, a good flaky salt, and I tell the waitstaff to explain the newspaper cone, if anyone asks: It’s a thing from her dad. He used to always do that.
About a year later, this time at the end of the season, I find in my mailbox a package with a bubble-wrapped jar of homemade bread-and-butter dill pickles; it’s poorly sealed and the liquid looks cloudy. This time there is a note that says, Mistakes were made. Hope you enjoy my latest project. And he signs it, simply—Dad.
I put the murky jar of homemade pickles up on the bookshelf next to the urn that has our dog’s ashes. I didn’t know about Barry Goldwater when I was six, and he was teaching me about runners-up and also-rans. But I am in my fifties by now. I know who Nixon was. I know “mistakes were made.”
I spend quite a bit of time in the following months chewing over this maddeningly unsatisfying, passive phrase—mistakes were made—and wondering if he actually thinks that’ll do it. If that’ll bring us back to life. A few charming words handwritten in his black felt pen, his architectural penmanship, meant to resuscitate. I suspect he has no inkling of how it landed on me, the dead daughter, to have been declared dead. Even I don’t yet know how it has landed on me; I’m still making witty quips about it, giggling on the couch at the analyst’s office, telling it as a joke at parties. As if it was funny and not itself lethal. “A jar of pickles!” I exclaim, giggling. “As if that’ll do the trick!” The overtures he makes are dear, and approximate; here is a man, a father in the last weeks or months of his own life, who starts to feel the pinch of time, trying to bring his dead daughter back to life with wet newspaper and murky pickles. It’s like he’s wearing a Halloween-costume white lab coat and one of those big mirror things strapped to his forehead, fumbling the CPR, with his toy plastic defibrillator and a child’s play-doctor rubber stethoscope. And here is his daughter, the actual life-sized patient—unimpressed, with her arms crossed against her chest; she has, unfortunately, long ago been made aware of high standards and the value of meeting them.
His efforts are oblique, offhand, and emotionally inexpensive; he does not spend the actual emotional capital it would take to bring his daughter back from the dead. He doesn’t seem to want to exert himself. He seems more inclined to summon her in an aesthetic and gestural way. But to her it reads as amateur and half-assed, like instead of walking out to where she is buried to do the hard shoveling to exhume her—instead of getting back on that overturned mower, shaking, but professional—he is instead goofing around with a Ouija board with friends, sitting around in a squirmy candlelit séance, hoping for a signal.
And again, I do not reach out to him.
But then, some months later, he calls to make a reservation at my restaurant. He has spoken with my manager, who sends me a panicked text: What should I do? He wants a brunch rezzie??? He is apparently not as near to death’s door as I had imagined.
These parents, whom we count as down at least four or five times in their end zones, about whom we make urgent false-alarm calls to all the important people—“Better get here!” we say. “It looks like this is it, the end!”—but who then rise, astoundingly, and take walks in the hallways of their nursing homes demanding butterscotch candies from the nurses, who stand in their driveways hosing down their boats, who schedule their haircuts in time to be wheeled into a restaurant for a dry Manhattan—two cherries—and who blow out the candles on yet one more hard-to-believe birthday cake. I cannot be anything but proud of him and frankly awed: I thought he was as good as dead, but, apparently, he is back from the brink. He is thinking about coming into New York City and he wants brunch.
For this, I come back to life. I call him back. We don’t take reservations for brunch. He answers.
“Hey, Dad. I heard you called for a brunch reservation. What is the occasion?”
“No, nothing special. Just coming in to see a matinee and I thought we’d stop for lunch.”
I’ve had my restaurant some sixteen years by then; he’s eaten there three times. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in the four years since Jeffrey killed himself, and this is the first conversation we are having, and it’s about a brunch reservation. He’s down to one leg, I’ve heard, and uses a walker.
“Dad, um, brunch is a real circus. What is the reason for your visit, if you don’t mind my asking? Why is it important that you have brunch at Prune?” I ask again. “I can make you a reservation anywhere, if you’d like, someplace calmer and closer to the theater.”
“Oh, nothing special, Gabs. Just going to a matinee and thought I’d have lunch at your place. We don’t want any special treatment or anything.”
There are over twenty-five thousand restaurants in New York City; to me it is mandatory that if he is to get what he wants then he must say what it is he is really after. Maybe it is the sixteen-hour restaurant days; the alternate-side parking of the car; the walking of the new dog; the increasingly complex needs of the two adolescent children; the thirty employees; the divorce; the writing deadlines; the two dead brothers; the exile from home, hometown, and family—self-imposed or otherwise—or the three days a week of hard, unflinching labor on the analyst’s couch, but, whatever it is, I am unwilling to budge on this.
There’s a section in the Berlitz phrase books for all the things you may want to say in languages you don’t speak, phrases that can be used and uttered by anyone—phonetically—no matter their generation. They are just the letters that, when strung together, form the words that convey the sentiments. All you have to do is be willing to sound them out and commit to saying them. You don’t have to be fluent. Or literate. You can buy a shirt, exchange foreign currency, eat at a restaurant, discuss the weather, get directions, tell the hospital doctor what’s wrong, go on a date, go on a same-sex date, change a tire, ask to charge your iPad, you just have to have the will to say what you want to say.
