Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(26)

My dad is also the owner of a laugh that could light up an entire football field. When he laughs, he knows he’s doing you a favor, because it heightens the mood and sets the tone. He has the power to take all the tension out of a room—usually tension he was responsible for creating in the first place—with one huge smile and a head tilt, and when he turned around a good corner, we all jumped on board without any need for an apology for the behavior that came before. We were just joyful to move on to the fun stuff, because if he was in a bad mood, everyone would be walking on eggshells.

    His laughter was loud, and if you could get him going, he would throw his head back and howl, and then slam his hand on the dining room table, and it was infectious. No one laughs like that unless people are watching, but I never thought about that then.

In those moments, when he was wildly happy and playful, it was impossible to think of him as anything less than everything.

What a power to have to set the tone for an entire room. What a burden. To have that kind of power means you are responsible for every mood in the room. If everyone is scared of you, then you are the one in charge. I definitely know what that feels like, because the more I write about him, the more I realize how much I am him. I kind of respect my father when I think about him in broader and more forgiving terms. Back then he really didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about him. Or maybe he did. I just know what I thought of him. He was a faker, but he was also a force of nature. No person is just one thing.

That’s how I’m like my father. I know I’m always putting on a show. I like to be contagious. I love lighting up a room. I know how powerful that is and I revel in it. It’s when I feel the most like myself. It makes me feel smart and charming—what my father probably felt when he did it. Glowing, beaming, self-satisfied.

    All of my summer visits after I moved to California had that same tenor. They were all a bit idyllic, and more fun, and we were all adults, so there were boyfriends and girlfriends and spouses and babies, and the atmosphere in the house seemed ebullient again. My dad seemed ebullient again. He was never fully happy, because he is naturally very moody, but when he was on the Vineyard, we all felt the love.

He would always tell me I looked too skinny, which was silly because I’ve never been too skinny no matter which eating disorder I was testing out.

One night when we were all out to dinner, I whispered to the server that I wanted a double vodka on the rocks, and my dad chimed in.

“If you’re going to order a double, you should do it loudly and with confidence. You like your vodka, Chels. That’s your ameliorant. I’m your dad. I know my own child. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was moments like that with my father that filled me with warm affection. Once I got older, I never really had to hide anything from him, because I felt how much he adored me again. His moods were not personal. They weren’t about me, at least not anymore. I always knew when my father looked at me that he thought I was smart, that I was capable, and that anyone who was in my way better get out of the way because I was filled with conviction. That was his word for me: conviction. My word for him was the prefix of that word: con.



* * *



? ? ?

“Then he had quintuple-bypass surgery when he was in his late sixties, or seventy, maybe…anyway, and then it was all downhill after that.”

“In what way?” Dan asked.

I came home early for Christmas one year in my mid-twenties because my dad had been rushed to the hospital the night before with chest pain, and they discovered that he had ninety percent blockage in all five of his main arteries. He would need surgery the next morning.

“My mom woke me up early the next morning. ‘Chelsea, your father just called and said he wants to wait until the spring for his bypass surgery, so I’m going to go pick him up from the hospital.’?”

I could have hit my mother right then and there. That was so my mother. So passive and so easily pushed around. It drove me mad. Only my father would think he could wait and schedule bypass surgery during a more pleasant time of year—as if he were scheduling a garden party. That’s the kind of asshole I was dealing with.

I got out of bed and went into my mother’s bathroom to brush my teeth. I used my parents’ bathroom when I came home to visit, which was odd because their bathroom was a complete shitshow, a representation of my mother’s “European-style” hygiene.

My mission was to get him into the operating room, and there was no other possible outcome. When I was running out the front door into the snow in our driveway—I was in some version of pajamas or sleepwear, and for some reason, I had thrown on my dad’s Ugg boots—my mother asked if she should come, and I remember looking at her and thinking, Definitely not.

    At the hospital I screamed and yelled and threw one of the biggest tantrums of all time, until he agreed to go into surgery. I fought so hard just to get a father I couldn’t stand to stick around. My brothers and sisters were shocked that I had gotten him into surgery, because he could be so stubborn. They couldn’t believe I had convinced him to do it. No one could convince my father of anything.

I had proven myself to be responsible. I had become someone you could rely on to get the job done. I liked that feeling a lot. My family knew I meant business that day, that I was dependable. The biggest fuckup in the family could do something none of them had even tried to do—guide a rhinoceros into an operating room. The surprise in Simone’s voice filled me with pride.